Hoplomachus: Remastered First Impressions

Hoplomachus: Remastered is an arena combat game played with a bunch of chips.

I can’t think why.

Hoplomachus [ha-ploh-ma-kuss], or “Hoplo” for short, is a hex-based tactical board game set inside a gladiatorial arena.

Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

There are several ways to play the game including solo and co-op but I’ve only played it PvP so I’m going to talk about that here.

Each player has a faction consisting of a hero and several supporting characters, all represented by chips of course.

Players will take turns completing the phases of the game:

Score: If you have a unit in a scoring zone in the middle of the arena, score a point.
Deploy: Put a new unit on the board at full health represented by a stack of chips. You can also play a tactic which is a chip that can help your units or hinder an opponent depending on who you play it.
Move: All of your units up to their move value.
Engage: Attack a target within range with the dice shown on their chip. Dice either show hit or miss in various quantities, each hit usually means one damage. Score points to unlock abilities, refresh tactics and recruit powerful units.

How do you win?

Defeat the opponent’s hero, or clear them off the board to win.

Main Mechanisms

Grid movement and dice rolling for combat. The rest of the mechanisms don’t feel very major. “Hand Management” is just deciding when to play something or not.

USP

This is a remake so there is no USP.

Theme

It’s a mild mix of fantasy and thematic combat stuff.

Elements like the various weapon attacks making sense and animals moving out of control unless with someone that can control them, little bits of theme like that.

Setup

Roll out the board and put stuff on it. It doesn’t take long, there is a pretty good storage solution so grabbing a faction and cracking on is pretty quick.

Components & Artwork

The chips are really nice and weighty, the dice are nice and the play mat is nice, but curls up at the edges.

Not my style of art.

Ease of Teaching

The game itself is easy to teach. There is a nice (if large) sheet that explains all of the character abilities really well.

Similar Games

Super Fantasy Brawl is similar in gameplay terms but has a very different theme and minis. Disney’s Sorcerer’s Arena: Epic Alliances is the same but with standees.

Both have the combat and control aspect. Come to think of it, Warhammer Underworld’s: Shadespire also has that same thing going on but is card-driven with minis.

Hoplomachus: Remastered Review

Positives

Simple gameplay that is quite tactical.

The components are really nice. having chips as health makes those powerful units look imposing on the mat.

The factions all play differently.

The option to play solo and co-op as well as a campaign is useful because…

Negatives

…the PvP combat space is pretty full so it would have to be really special to get a look in for my collection.

The order in which you do things is, at times, really important but it isn’t printed anywhere.

Like all Chip Theory games, it’s very expensive.

Summary

Not a bad game.

Jesta ThaRogue