This review is for the Pandora’s Wake expansion for Hoplomachus Remastered, which has solo and competitive play in a fantasy-based ancient Rome in which various factions battle in gladiatorial arenas.
Wait, you’re probably asking yourself, didn’t Tony review that expansion a month or so earlier? Sort of. He reviewed Homplomachus Victorum’s Pandora’s Ruin.
And I did just copy my own introduction from my review of the base game of Hoplomachus Remastered (Spoiler: It’s good). But do you need more of it? Read on to find out.
Expansion Overview:
Pandora’s Wake comes with the Vesuvians faction, a double-sided mat, and two new game modes.
The first mode is called Condemned, and it has you either solo or competitively trying to get your condemned wretch out of the arena before they die. In competitive mode, you’re drafting pairs of hero chips to build your forces. You keep one and pass the other to your opponent.
The overall gameplay is pretty similar to the base game with a few exceptions. The first is two immobile critters/monsters on the board that whomp on everything nearby. The second is how the Arena will change its behavior with each favor reward granted. This could be beneficial or a hindrance. The third difference is how favor is earned. Like the base game, it’s earned by doing damage to opponents as well as occupying specific spots on the map. The most valuable spaces are near the things slapping your troops around.
As you hit each favor reward, the limit of troops you have goes up, and your wretch levels up from zero to hero, with different skills at each level. Get your wretch to the other gate or eliminate your opponent’s wretch to win.
The other mode is Naumachia, which is a recreation of naval battles in the Colosseum with little boats. Each boat has four units in it, with the front unit being the captain, and that, in turn, dictates the speed (3x the captain), range (Captain’s range), and damage dice (Captain’s + 1 yellow die for each troop behind them).
Except, each captain’s class can modify various stats, like attackers allowing your shipmates to roll blue dice instead of yellow, and protectors reducing damage taken by one. When ships are attacked, they lose favor, and at each stage, one chip gets tossed overboard. After the fourth favor stage is reached, your hero appears. And since the goal is to defeat the hero, that will likely start everyone converging on your soggy star.
Meanwhile, the folks swimming in the water can earn valuable tactic chips by getting to platforms before the crocodiles eat them that earn various perks.
The battle ends when one hero is defeated.
Game Experience with the Expansion:
With the dependency of the Condemned mode on having more heroes, the flexibility of the game goes up with the content you own. That being said, for what’s included in the base box, there are plenty of possible combinations to experiment with. I love the hero drafting, where you draft two and keep one, as it gives you some agency for who you’re going to face. But without knowing everything, there’s some risk in trying to outsmart randomness.
Getting into the details of each mode, Condemned is a mix of a race and a fight, sort of like Thunder Road Vendetta. You want to Jim Morrison your wretched (you know, break on through to the other side) but need to deal damage to arena mobs and your opponent to power them up enough to survive. Likewise, the easy way to earn favor is to take the tentacles right to the face near the center of the arena.
The escalation of adding troops as you gain favor adds flexibility to shield your wretched as much as inflict more damage.
The Naumachia mode is a variant skirmish with boats but without movement restrictions on the boats; they feel less like boats and more like chip holders. If I were going to add one more exception to the rule set, it would be that boats could only move in the forward direction, and it costs movement to turn. Likewise, arcs for attacking would be cool and make the positioning more important.
That nitpick aside, it’s still a fun mode, but with a single set of units to be used in solo, the replay value is slightly reduced. But I really enjoyed trying to figure out how to get troops on platforms, pick the optimal order for my troops in the ship, and deal with both crocodiles and my opponent. While I didn’t care for the Onslaught mode as feeling too tough, I really liked this mode despite also getting walloped. Probably because I felt like I had a chance. And the boat minis are super cool and functional.
Where do these modes land for me with the base game as either a solo or two player game? I’d probably put the straight up skirmish first, followed by Ascension, Condemned, and then Naumachia, with Onslaught bringing up the rear, But, despite my relative dislike of Onslaught, I’d play it if a friend wanted to so there’s no bad modes.
Final Thoughts:
Pandora’s Wake adds two new solo and competitive modes to Hoplomachus Remastered, so if you’re going to play both solo and competitively, I think it’s a buy, especially if you have a lot of other content for Hoplomachus. If you’re only going to play solo, the Naumachia mode will have less variability as you always play against a single AI-driven faction. As such, it may only be optional for solo-only or solo-majority players, especially those who don’t have all the content.
For me, these are fun modes, and I’m glad to have them as options to offer to play with others or solo.
Hits:
• More modes to play
• Both new modes play competitively or solo
• Condemned draft of heroes is fun
Misses:
• Naumachia uses a special army for solo mode
• The variability of the Condemned mode depends on how much Hoplomachus you have
• Boat movement is not boat-like
