Hoplomachus Victorum – a solo review

Imagine taking a pair of Divine Tweazers and yoink Russell ‘Maximus’ Crowe by the scruff of his neck – oy, careful! – out of his Roman surroundings. Then Select All, Ctrl-C that now Crowe-less world, open Slay the Spire, and paste your selection. Gently lower Russell back in there and you’re done! This is pretty much how one could imagine Hoplomachus Victorum came to be. Are you not entertained?

Name: Hoplomachus Victorum (2023)
Designer: Josh J. Carlson, Adam Carlson, Logan Giannini
Publisher: Chip Theory Games
Play type: tactical combat, variable player powers

What the game is about

Can you battle your way across the land to gather a fighting crew that is both competent and daring enough to take on the god of the underworld, Pluto? Across the four acts of Hoplomachus Victorum, you will be partaking in different events in order to grow as a gladiator and to accrue a crew needed to face all the trials that have come your way.

How the game works

Hoplomachus Victorum is an epic board game experience that seeks to emulate the video game roguelike genre, condensing it into board game form. You are a gladiator looking to complete four acts, each of them with a boss battle at the end – primuses (unused gladiator chips) for acts I-III, and a scion at the end of the game. You start out with a basic squad of units in your squads, which you can expand as the game goes on.

The map consists of eight different regions, each with its own units and arenas; each of those with its own thematic cohesion and in-game rules. For each act, you have 12 weeks to traverse the map to reach the location where you will fight one of the three predetermined primuses. The map is littered with three different event locations. Sporting events are affairs where you need to occupy key hexes (king of the hill) get the flag back to your starting locations, or kill every rival unit with the exception of the predetermined so-called tribune (sparring). These events are non-lethal, so the units you lost come back after the battle. If you win, you get to recruit an opposing unit. Bloodshed events are fights to the death, usually with some additional rules or restrictions. Dead units are returned to the draw bag; if you win the event, you get to increase a stat, increase a die, or gain another die. Finally, opportunities are challenges you can accept to gain a reward later when you have completed the challenge. This can be gaining unique units, generic skills, or hero-specific skills called prowess cards. All of these events have you mark off a week on your tracker sheet.

If you don’t want to do a specific event, or you need to stock up on health or tactic chips, you can spectate. Because this doesn’t cost a week, you can spectate to either recoup or make up ground to face the primus or scion in time. While all your other units start each battle at full health, your hero never heals back unless you spectate and choose to do so.

However, spectating isn’t exactly free. This is when the scion you’re up against stirs, spreading its influence. Every time you spectate, you gain scion influence equal to the act number. Every time you gain four influence, you add a bane chip to the draw bag where you draw units for the rival lineup from. Bane chips have a detrimental effect when you draw them; either buffing opposing units or adding a particularly tough one to the rival lineup.

You win the game if you manage to complete all four acts and beat the scion at the end. You lose the game if your hero dies and you have run out of blessings – a free revive, some amount of which you get at the start of the game based on your chosen difficulty level.

Theme, setting & narrative

So what we have here is some kind of fantasy gladiatorial world, where interesting regions are right next to each other and we fight humans and other creatures. The Hoplomachus series has always been a hodgepodge of mechanisms and thematic influences, but in a way, I think this has settled into a world of its own – one where you are duking it out with fellow gladiators, only to have a Fury or even the god of the underworld himself show up! I really like how I get the feeling I am progressing as both a fighter and a leader. Thematic touches (like how defeated units, as well as discarded units from your camp, go into the draw bag so you can possibly face them again later) help drive home this theme and create an interesting emerging narrative that lends itself to stories of betrayal, rivalry, and survival. While the overarching plot here isn’t as strong here as it is in Too Many Bones, I do appreciate the effort that went into it.

How does it play?

I said it in the intro as kind of a joke, but it helps explain this game in an elevator pitch – ‘imagine the roguelike elements and structure of Slay the Spire, set in a fantasy version of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator’. That’s a pretty accurate description, though! Throughout four acts, you will be having various encounters and you’ll face a boss at the end – either a primus (a fellow gladiator, chosen from the leftover playable gladiators) or a scion. Instead of building a deck, you’re building a squad and leveling up your own stats. It combines strategical decisions of how you want to level up with randomized encounters and tactical gameplay.

There are a lot of things to keep the game fresh. Besides the RNG encounter, you have eight different characters to play (as your hero) or to play against (as primuses). Each of them has their own upgrade paths available. I haven’t played all of them yet, but I suspect each of them has multiple approaches. My plays certainly seem to indicate this. This is helped by the fact that the end game scion you’ll face also requires you to do your homework. For example, if you know they can retaliate, you might be looking at getting a lot of ranged units.

These types of decisions also influence the path you take when you trek across the lands. You can see the top card of each deck (sporting events, opportunities, and bloodshed events) and each faction stack, so you know what you can expect. But still, there is a healthy chunk of randomness that forces you to stay on your toes.

The randomness that characterized the videogame genre is represented in Victorum through the combination of random events, combined with the arena of the region you’re in, and the units you’ll face. King of the Hill events are much harder in the Vesuvians region than, say, Kunlun; likewise, if all units of a specific region are in the bag, it might be better to avoid that region or run the risk of facing local units with an inherent advantage. The result is an interesting randomized combat encounter, with some good and bad outliers. I think this isn’t to blame on randomness; rather, I think it rewards players for finding ways to maximize lop-sided encounters and avoid the tougher ones. Spectating costs you scion influence, so you have to decide what is more valuable – scion influence, or your precious blessings.

Each arena has its own rules, as well as its own priorities for enemy movement and targeting. While everything is detailed pretty well, it’s still a lot to digest, especially as priorities shift from one arena to the next. Combine this with a double-sided reference sheet full of unit keywords, and you know your first few encounters and acts will have a lot of downtime as you look up rules. While every keyword is perfectly fine (and thematically sound), it’s the confluence of all of them that can bog you down as you start learning the game. It’s not that it’s not worth the investment, but you have to know going in that it requires this investment of you.

Investment – that’s a good word to segway into the next segment; time investment. Boy, is this game long! With four acts, it’s like stringing together 4 games of Too Many Bones! Yes, it is epic, but yes, it is long. When I log my plays, I count each act as one full game, because one act is longer than pretty much any game in my collection. I think the game would be perfectly serviceable with three acts and/or with acts that only have 9 or 10 weeks (as opposed to 12). Besides, I think the gameplay can start to suffer from something which I also noticed in burncycle – ‘leftover’ upgrades (especially hero prowess cards) start to lose their value as you have already picked out the best of ’em. As I said, not as bad as the end game in a three-floor burncycle map, where I would literally have nothing more to upgrade into. Another thing I noticed was that faction stacks empty out relatively quickly, especially ones of primuses you’ll face. I found that it meant that towards the later acts, the uniqueness of battles starts to ebb and flow – there isn’t guaranteed to be a local unit at all, but you might just pull three of them out of the bag.

This segways nicely into something that’s near-obligatory to mention in a Chip Theory Games game, and that is the use of dice and their inherent randomness. I have never really found the use of dice in any of their games to be detrimental or frustrating; bottom line, dice create tension and excitement, and I feel all of the highs and lows even out over a game. In Hoplomachus Victorum, I’d call the dice a double-edged sword (hah!) that’s mostly positive, though. Yes, dice can really hurt you, but I think that’s mostly because you’ve put yourself in a position where they can hurt you in the first place. Victorum rewards careful play and thinking ahead; pushing your luck might give you a taste of your own medicine. Dice are random; making a plan isn’t. Except for dice rolls, everything that happens in the game is either determined by the game’s rules (enemy targeting and movement) or by you (your own movement, and enemy movement in case of more than one valid hex or target). Hoplomachus Victorum isn’t a dice game just because it has dice in it; it’s a strategic, highly tactical game that uses dice.

Still, sometimes it can really feel like the dice are against you, and all your well-laid plans go to waste, even taking into account a nonzero margin of error. Barring blessings, the game does not have a way to make it easier for you to play during the game. There are a lot of ways to tweak the difficulty beforehand, but there is no way for the game to help you get out of a rough patch. At times when playing this game, I felt it was prone to the same kind of death spiral I suppose some games of Too Many Bones are prone to as well – lose too often, or at opportune times, and you get behind the curve so far that it’s hard or near-impossible to catch up. But just like in Too Many Bones, this is but a mechanism that rewards repeat plays.

The death spiral kind of works like this. You either lose a battle or win by the skin of your teeth. In most cases, your hero has too little health that it’s hard to continue, so you need to spectate to get back health. Or you need to spectate to recharge your tactics. Or you might need to start participating in sporting events to fill your ranks back up. While I think the game was designed with this back-and-forth in mind, I do think losses have a tendency to foreshadow themselves a little too early. But again; this may be the inexperience talking.

Unlike in Slay the Spire, there aren’t any predetermined ‘safe zones’ where you can take a breather and heal back up; on the flip side though, thanks to the spectate mechanism, any room can be a safe zone. I feel like in my early plays, I was so focused on not spectating to keep my scion influence as low as possible, but I started to realize that wasn’t necessarily the right path. The game operates wonderfully on the knife edge between careful play and pushing your luck; between long-term strategy and RNG tactics.

What you might like

• an excellent boardgame adaptation of the roguelike videogame genre that features its key ingredients: random encounters, strategic leveling, and tactical gameplay
• lots of interesting combinations of the above ingredients make for gameplay that remains fresh
• the game rewards multiple plays in the way you learn how to maximize everything the game throws at you (that even goes for taking into account unfavorable dice results)
• various difficulty levels to play the game on (and it doesn’t take rocket science to tweak them even further if you so desire)

What you might not like

• enemy behavior can be tricky to get down, especially as priorities shift from one arena to the next
• big time investment, both in learning and in completing a full game – the game could’ve probably been shorter
• while I wouldn’t call this a dice game – it’s more like ‘a game with dice’ – there are times when you will curse them (but it might have been your own fault for setting yourself up for failure)
• multiple losses in a row can set you up for a veritable death spiral

Expansion

While it’s not an expansion, you could call Hoplomachus Remastered Victorum’s brother. Where Victorum is a solo-only affair, Remastered has four different game modes that can be played with anywhere from 1 to 4 players. Its focus isn’t on small tactical battles, but rather arena combat on a grander scale. If you want to learn more about Hoplomachus Remastered, check out my review.

You can interchange units between both games, either any number of factions or otherwise interchange units from within the same faction. I suppose there are great drafting variants possible with either game; I can imagine drafting your squad of six in Remastered out of twelve rather than six units or having a random lineup of six units per faction in Victorum.

Conclusion

Hoplomachus Victorum is a game that takes time; not just in playtime, but also to ‘git gud’. It’s up to you if you are up to that – and if you are, if you’re willing to put in the time, you are up for a great experience. That’s not the case; winning takes skills, and skill takes time. Whether you are willing to put in that time is up to you – you should know that this review was written by someone who is. But Chip Theory Games, for the love of Pluto, please find a way to shorten the game.

Rating: ★★★★☆

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