Conquistador (game)

Lore & Background

Conquistador was designed by Richard Berg, with assistance from Greg Costikyan, and artwork by Redmond A. Simonsen. It first appeared as a pull-out game in Issue 58 of Strategy & Tactics, and later as a boxed set. The SPI version includes a 22" x 32" hex grid map of North and South America, 200 die-cut counters, and a 12-page rules booklet. The boxed set also contains two six-sided dice. The Avalon Hill edition, published in 1983 after TSR sold the rights, contains 520 counters and slightly revised rules.

Reader's Guide

Conquistador is significant as a board game that simulates the economic and exploratory aspects of the Age of Exploration, rather than focusing on combat. It was noted for its complexity and entertainment value, with reviewers such as Nick Palmer calling it 'a complex and highly entertaining game' and 'very much a fun game'. The game was a finalist for the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Strategic Game of 1976. Although it generated steady sales, it never made SPI's Top Ten list, partly because Strategy & Tactics subscribers preferred hard World War II military games. The game's legacy includes a simplified version, New World, published by Avalon Hill in 1990. Conquistador is remembered for its detailed mechanics, including phases for royal council, naval movement, land exploration, and maintenance, as well as victory points for exploration goals and control of areas.

Did You Know?

• The SPI version of Conquistador was published as a pull-out game in Strategy & Tactics #58.
• Assistant designer Greg Costikyan noted that the SPI edition's 200 counters led to shortages of certain counters during play.
• The game includes a solitaire scenario where Spain is played by a single player.

Origins: A Harvard Student's Rejected Masterpiece

Born from a Harvard classroom and a love of old card games, Diplomacy traces its creative roots to Allan B. Calhamer, who first sketched the rough framework in 1954. His academic work under historian Sidney B. Fay on nineteenth-century European affairs, combined with a deep interest in political geography, gave him the thematic backbone. Two other games left their fingerprints: Hearts, where Calhamer noticed players naturally banded together to pressure whoever was ahead, and chess, whose confined board and limited pieces suggested a tight, strategic map. Over the next few years, playtesting refined the design until a 1958 revision settled the map and rules. When major publishers turned the project down, Calhamer bankrolled a modest five-hundred-copy print run himself in 1959, releasing it commercially in the United States. That stubborn independence paid off in the long run; the very first copy from that original run was eventually put up for auction by the Calhamer estate in 2017, a small artifact marking the moment a self-published experiment became the seed of one of board gaming's most enduring titles.

The Negotiation Engine: Strategy Without Chance

Diplomacy strips away the randomness that defines most wargames. There are no dice, no chance-based modifiers, no hidden information beyond what players choose to reveal. Instead, the entire engine of the game runs on negotiation and the simultaneous execution of orders. Each round, players spend a substantial period talking, persuading, and betraying one another, forming temporary alliances to push their armies and fleets across the map. Once the negotiation window closes, every player secretly writes down attack and support orders, and all moves are revealed and resolved at the same time rather than in a sequential turn order. A province changes hands when the number of provinces ordered to support the attacker outweighs those backing the defender. The strategic goal is to accumulate a majority of the supply centers scattered across the board, because each center a player controls determines how many units they are allowed to field. This creates a tight feedback loop: diplomacy buys territory, territory funds armies, and armies reshape the diplomatic landscape for the next round.

Legacy: From Mail Games to a Global Brand

Few board games have spawned as rich a subculture as Diplomacy. It was the first commercially published title to be played by mail, a format known as PBM, opening the game to players who could not gather in one room. It also generated the first active hobby scene around a commercial game, complete with amateur fanzines circulated among enthusiasts. Competitive face-to-face tournaments have been organized since the 1970s, and by the late 1980s the game had migrated to e-mail play, or PBEM, where it found a massive and enduring online audience. Today, games are adjudicated by either a computer program or a human gamemaster over the Internet. On the publishing side, the title has cycled through Games Research, Avalon Hill, Hasbro, and Wizards of the Coast in the United States, while licenses have been granted to Parker Brothers, Waddingtons, Gibsons, and Asmodée for international editions. The name itself is a registered trademark held by Hasbro's Avalon Hill division, a testament to how a 1959 self-published experiment grew into a globally recognized brand.

The Board: A Stylized 1901 Europe with 1914 Bones

The playing field is a stylized map of Europe as it stood in 1901, extended to include Turkey, Syria, and North Africa. The board is divided into fifty-six land regions and nineteen sea regions. Forty-two of those land regions belong to the seven Great Powers—Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey—while fourteen start as neutral territory. Thirty-four supply centers, representing major cities of government, industry, and commerce, are distributed across the map; twenty-two sit within the Great Powers' home territories and twelve are scattered among the neutral provinces. Starting unit counts vary slightly: most powers field two armies and one fleet, Britain begins with two fleets and one army, and Russia is the only player to start with four units, two of each type. Play unfolds in two seasonal turns, Spring and Fall. Historically, the map reflects 1914 boundaries rather than 1901—Bosnia is already annexed to Austria-Hungary and the Balkans show the aftermath of the 1912 and 1913 wars—yet Montenegro is oddly grouped under the Austro-Hungarian sphere, and North Africa and Tunis remain neutral despite French colonial control at the time.