From: Sandy Petersen <sandyp@IDGECKO.IDSOFTWARE.COM>
Subject:      Re: CONQUISTADOR

>But we had to throw in the towl.  24 turns or something, and
>each turn is very long and a lot of hard work.  Has anyone
>actually finished this game face to face, and not by mail?

You bet. Several times. Here are what I perceive as the strong
and weak points of CONQUISTADOR.

STRENGTHS

        1) A fine multiplayer game in which the various sides are
clearly unbalanced. There's no doubt that the Spanish are
powerhouses, while the Portuguese are weak sisters. In our group,
this freed us largely from concerns of "winning" and let us
concentrate on "playing".

        2) The game changes continually as play evolves. At
first, almost every expedition you send to the new world is wiped
out, and you try to get points by sailing round the globe on
risky explorations, and so forth. Later, your goal is to pillage
the hapless natives. Still later, you start colonial wars, and
at one point your colonists actually start making so much money
that you actually take them out of the gold mines so they can
farm instead.

         3) The game is full of historical quirks. Since the
arrival of explorers is historical, while play is not, the
explorers might come when you don't need any, or you might not
get one when you're desperate for same. Then there's other things
like the random event table, a sort of Sword of Damocles that
hangs over you every turn. 

WEAKNESSES (note parallel to strengths)

        1) the various sides are clearly unbalanced. There's no
doubt that the Spanish are powerhouses, while the Portuguese are
weak sisters. In some groups, this might demoralize the weak
players or seem "unfair".

        2) the game changes continually as play evolves. If you
find that you especially like one type of play, but don't care
for the later styles, then you might well find the game moving
away from the activities you enjoy.

        3) The game is full of historical quirks. Some players
hate this kind of stuff.

In summary, we found CONQUISTADOR to be a fine evening game that
nobody took too seriously. There's enough random events in the
game so that no losing player feels bad about his loss -- he can
always blame it on his big expedition across the Amazon in which
he rolled "6"s twice in a row and lost all his men. On the other
hand, the winning player can still feel good about his win --
he's certain to have had plenty of negative random events of his
own, after all. 

Sandy Petersen