40K Conquest

I've started playing the new living card game from Fantasy Flight Games based on 40K called Conquest.

Like pretty much everything FFG puts out it is good quality, reused artwork and comes with more tokens and playing chits than you can shake a force weapon at. However, unlike most of their games, Conquest isn't unnecessarily complex. In fact it is quite the opposite, being easy to learn and the playing time is about half an hour based upon the games I've played thus far. It seems to be based in part on the old Warhammer 40K card game by Sabretooth Games but simplified and more player friendly.

The idea of the game is to capture the planets of the Traxis sector by winning command struggles (resources and cards basically) and by capturing the first planet. There are ten planets presently but you only ever play the first seven randomly drawn from the deck. Each planet has one, two or three coloured icons, and victory is determined by being the player who captures three planets with matching coloured icons.

In the starter box there are several factions: space marines, imperial guard, chaos, orks, eldar, dark eldar and tau empire. In a future expansion necrons and tyranids will be added to the roster.

So far I think the game has good potential and as a LCG you don't need to be chasing down boosters for the rare cards. Each month sees a 60 card pack released so that everyone has the same cards and the same pool to draw upon.

At present I have only the one starter though I think as usual for an LCG you really want two just to get the extra cards. As I have been playing against opponents with two or three starters I have not done very well at all outside of the first few games. At the moment I am trying a space marine deck with imperial guard allies. They seem good at dealing damage but not so good in winning me the command struggle so I tend not to be able to play my more expensive cards and units.

I know I'm not so good at explaining games like this so here is the tutorial video. Enjoy.