Conquest
It's another Wargaming Wednesday and it's another Cob Homemade special!
After the great interest in our first Cob Homemade game 'The Wild Race' we've been working hard to get another one of our homemade games up and ready to play!
The game is Conquest!
Conquest is a game for 2-4 players and focuses around the idea of a Lord, the leader of a great and noble House, building an army and setting out to conquer the world. Conquest will ask players to build armies to attack enemy lands or defend their land against other rival Lords and Houses, the battles being played out on the tabletop using the play rules for LOTR battle strategy game.
No player will take control of a particular race or army from the LOTR rulebook however, each player gets a generic army list to choose from and the great heroes and characters that will lead their armies are the Lord and the members of his House, as well the Lord's personal War Council made up of Captains, Generals and Wizards.
Here at Cob we have a multitude of models and armies that we've collected over the years, and it's nice to showcase them all! With the use of generic army lists, armies can be built using models from pretty much any fantasy model range that uses scales between roughly 25mm to 36mm including LOTR, AoS and Frostgrave.
Us Cobbers also love a good story, and at it's heart Conquest is a way to create an entirely new fantasy narrative for your battles, you'll create your houses and name your heroes and decide who will fight in which battles. Conquest will ask you to create a 'War Journal' where you will detail the history of your house, how it rose to power, it's famous ancestors as well as it's major victories and defeats!
We have nailed down the first draft of the rules, and over the next weeks and months we'll be bringing you our battle reports and let you know how the game is developing and progressing! After we've finished testing we'll be hoping to publish some official rules to share with you all so you can begin your own stories and campaigns.
So this week we kicked things off and began the Conquest journey!
Here we are in front of the laptop that is filled with tables, charts, stats and rules that have all be devised (some lifted from the LOTR rule book however) to use in generating our Lord's House and his successors as well as the heroes of his war council!
The beginning of the game sees each player create their houses randomly from a 'Successor' chart which randomly determines the members of each Lord's family tree. Lord's can have the full range of relations from spouses, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters and nephews and so on and so forth. These family members make up the named heroes of the army that are all available to play...they are all esteemed fighters...unless they are generated as 'Non-fighting' successors, which means that due to some reason (which is entirely up to the controlling player) that hero is unfit for battle, and although they can be used on the battlefield they will most likely be more of a hindrance!
As well as this, players generate special traits for each family member (which alter the heroes stats) and special abilities to make each hero unique.
After the family tree has been generated each player also receives a 'War Council' who are made up of the Lord's most trusted military advisers to help them in their goal of all out Conquest! Each War council contains a General, a Battle Standard Bearer, three Captains and two Wizards. These Heroes also generate traits and abilities to make them all different and give them all unique personalities, not only this but the Wizard's spells are all randomly determined and are taken from the LOTR rule book meaning no two Wizards are the same!
So without further ado, we'll introduce you to the two Houses we lovingly created that will be battling it out against each other!
Firstly we generated and named our Houses.
The first House we generated was House Black.
Here is Lord Ingo Black, who will be represented on the battlefield using the towering SlaughterPriest model. Ingo is a beast in combat as well as his already impressive stats he generated the 'expert swordsman' trait, meaning he has an unmatched fight value of 8! Ingo then generated a pretty full family tree, including a spouse, two sons, two daughters, a brother and a sister.
After some unfortunate rolling a few of the successors generated were 'non-fighting' (meaning for some reason they were unfit for battle) Already the story was emerging of the 'Black Rage' a strange debilitating psychosis that can affect the members of House Black turning them into crazed lunatics! Sadly Lord Ingo Black's main heir to his title, his eldest son Nero Black, has fallen to the illness. Meaning should the worst happen Ingo's title will have to be passed on to his lunatic son! The Black's are a strange and mysterious family by all appearances and so they have already been deemed the revolutionary family, prone to causing uprisings and unrest in the more civilized parts of the world!
Next we generated House Borgia, the house the Black's will be going up against.
Here we have Lord Byron Borgia, who will be represented on the battlefield as the equally impressive Knight Questor model. The reason for this was because the Borgia House developed a more royal and regal theme, they seemed to be a wealthy and powerful family and so naturally we wanted a model caked in gold armour to represent the leader of their house!
Byron received the 'fierce fighter' trait, granting him a total of four attacks! Both Lord's are going to be a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield!
Byron has been a busy boy, and his family tree included five children! As well as a spouse, a brother and a sister, Bryon has two sons, and three daughters. All of which are able to fight.
With the two houses created it was time to see which Houses owned which part of the map.
Here we have the map we will be fighting over for our Conquest Campaign! This map, and many maps like it can be found on the internet and there are some fantastic ones to choose from! Of course if you aren't totally talent-less like we are you could even draw and create your own!
This excellent map we found on google images, it's from Pinterest or you can find it on google images by searching 'blank fantasy continent map'.
For Conquest the map has to be divided into 16 sections, in this case we did this ourselves and each section represents a country.
At the start the Players choose which country they wish to make the home of their 'Capital' this is where the Lord's main bastion or fortress is located, and should an enemy wish to invade this country they will have to siege the opponents fortress! The player then gets to choose a country adjacent to their Capital to ensure it's security.
House Borgia got to choose first, and they made their Capital in the land of West Gemin and chose East Gemin as well.
House Black choose The Iron Shores to be the home of their Capital and chose Ankger also.
The rest of the lands were randomly allocated and in the end our world map looked like this:
The lands of House Black are shown (obviously) in Black and the Borgia's in White. It's a good spread of land but early on we can already see some isolated lands of the Borgia's that are looking vulnerable!
Once the land has been divided up the players take turns in allocating points to each country. In Conquest points are awarded and used in blocks of 100. Each land needing at least one block of 100 points to hold it. Each land starts with a single block of 100pts and after that players take turns in adding blocks of 100pts to any land they possess. Each player gets 24 blocks (that's 2400pts) to allocate to any land they own.
It may sound a little complicated but think of it like the board game Risk. Where players place single pieces on their lands which are meant to represent regiments or battalions. The blocks make it easy to keep track of how many points each land has access to when building armies to attack or defend.
The allocation of points is done in secret, so each player does not know how many points each land possesses!
In the first turn and subsequent turns after that each player will attack an enemy land with as many blocks of points they wish. For example, House Black places 7 blocks on Ankger. In the first turn they wish to attack Shard. They must leave a block to hold Ankger and so can attack Shard with up to 6 blocks. They attack with all 6 blocks. Shard has 4 blocks placed on it. The battle is then played out with the attacking player building an army of 600pts (as they have six blocks) and the defending player building an army of 400pts (as they have four blocks). The winner of the battle will claim or keep Shard.
With all 24 blocks of points allocated by both Houses the game is ready to begin! We'll be playing the first round out over the next couple of weeks, keep your eyes peeled on the blog for a battle report to see how both Houses fared in their first turn!
We're very excited to get this all underway, we hope you are too! What opening gambits will each House make? Can one gain an early advantage? Which heroes will fight or fall in the opening round? We can't wait to find out!
Until then however, thanks for reading and happy wargaming!
