Hoplomachus: Victorum and Remastered are live (Return to the arena)
Update: Hoplomachus: Remastered and Hoplomachus: Victorum are live on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 9 days. You may pledge just for Hoplomachus: Victorum or just for Remastered, or for both.
Our preview post below was published on May 5.
Chip Theory Games is bringing their Hoplomachus series of games back to Kickstarter, redesigned and packaged in two editions: Hoplomachus: Remastered and Hoplomachus: Victorum. The campaign will launch on May 11.
Hoplomachus: Remastered is merging together Hoplomachus: The Lost Cities and Hoplomachus: Rise of Rome with all their factions and add-ons, streamlining their rules, and presenting them with new artwork. It is going to be a solo, co-op and PvP game.
Hoplomachus: Victorum is a solitaire campaign game heavily inspired by Hoplomachus: Origins and that game's fighting in a smaller, tighter arena space. Your goal is to win a series of fights against the foes the angered god Pluto is throwing at you. Your hero will start out weak, they will travel around the map gathering gladiators to form their squad, and progressively grow stronger and stronger until they can ultimately face Pluto's scions in mount Vesuvius.
The game comes with 8 different arenas to fight in. As you progress from one arena to the next, you will be drawing event cards. These events will dictate what you are trying to achieve with each fight: it may be a fight to the death, or a 'king of the hill' fight, where you have to occupy a specific hex for a set amount of time in order to win, or a 'capture the flag' fight, where you have to reach the opponent's base and come back. If your gladiator dies, you can continue with a new one, or swap gladiators between fights as you see fit. The rules of the fight are essentially the same as in Origins: you roll dice and apply the results for both your gladiator and the opponents, using extra chips to boost your hero's health or tactics.
Victorum and Remastered can be combined so, for example, you can bring your gladiator from Remastered into Victorum if you wish.
I must be missing something. I've watched a playthrough and I just don't see what the fuss is.......
This one's (Victorum) been on my Wish List for quite a while. I had contacted Chip Theory Games in April of last year asking about Hoplomachus: Training Grounds (as seen below), as it was a smaller, faster version of other Hoplo games. I figured I could try that "scaled-down" version before jumping into a more beastly (and expensive) one. 🙂 Sadly, it had been discontinued.
Image Source: BGG
The folks at Chip Theory were very responsive to my queries (I am the MoS, after all 🙂). I ended-up corresponding with 3 different employees. First, Tink (Andrew), then Dart (Jeremy), and lastly Nugget (Amanda). They're based in Minnesota (Land of 10,000 Lakes), so I mentioned it sounded like mosquito-ville. Nugget rep…