From: Roberto Chiavini Subject: Two more reviews Ancient Conquests II (Excalibre Games) This game is an early predecessor of the Britannia-like games that have appeared in the last decade or so. It was made in the late Seventies and it's a game (it cannot be defined in any sense a simulation) on the ancient East Mediterranean and Middle East (but the map covers all of Persia to Bactria and India) from 600 to 200 BC. It is itself the successor (as the number 2 implies) of a similar game on the same zone before 600 BC (so the period with Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians and so on - a nice, but almost inane, peculiarity of Ancient Conquest II is that you have all the counters from the first game - but you don't have the rules to set up them!!). Graphics are not really bad for the standards of those days, but the choice of colors for a few set of counters (dark violet with black writing!!!! It is no good for people who has glasses like me) and for the map are clearly wrong and debatable. The game is for 4 players, with each player taking several different peoples, kind of Ancient Britannia. But the minus note on this side are the mixed colors which constitute the playing pieces of each player (making very confusing the situation of play after only a few moves, if not at the start) and the use of hexes instead of areas (or point to point) to move the pieces on the map. This results in strange situation, that really subtracts from the enjoyment of the (already not so good) game. For the rest, the rules are almost childish in their simplicity: each player move and than have combat, on land or on sea; there are three different ratio CRT (one land, one naval, one for siege resolution), no ZOCs, three kind of land units (heavy and light infantry and horses), war galleys, transport galleys, a plethora of exceptions, not really important or sophisticated enough for the historians among the players to make this game worth more than a try. Other than this, the game is too simple, too long and definitely boring: if you have three other friends to play with, don't choose this game, but try Britannia or something similar (like the recent Rus, for example). I rate this game 4 ½ in a 1-10 scale.