Hoplomachus: Victorum is a solo campaign packed with epic, tactical combats, offering tons of variety and meaningful choices. In this game, you travel across a map, participate in events, and upgrade your hero to prepare for a climactic final battle against a powerful Scion.

The Idea

The game features eight regions, each represented by an elite unit. You’ll choose one of these units as your hero, three others as Primuses, and pick a Scion as the final boss. The campaign is divided into four acts, each lasting 12 weeks. At the end of the first three acts, you battle a Primus, while the final act ends in a showdown against the Scion. Between these fights, you’ll travel the map to tackle Bloodshed events (to level up your hero), Sport events (to recruit units and gain Tactic Chips), and Opportunity events (gaining extra objectives that reward prowess cards, special units, or special tactics).

Start of the Campaign

Starting the campaign involves several key decisions, including your hero, starting units, prowess cards, and the Scion. This customization lets you tailor the experience to your playstyle, but it can feel overwhelming for first-time players. Thankfully, the rulebook offers clear recommendations for all these choices, helping beginners dive in quickly. After your first campaign, you’ll understand how each decision shapes your experience for your subsequent playthroughs.

The game offers three difficulty levels, each adjusting factors like unit and tactic capacities, hero health points, blessings (used for emergency revival and recruiting in combat), and hero prowess cards (skill upgrades).

Events

The game features three types of events: Bloodshed, Sport, and Opportunity, each bringing its own challenges and rewards.

Opportunity Events are straightforward. When you accept one, draw two cards and keep one. Each card offers a combat challenge (e.g., “Win an event using only ranged units”) and a reward. While optional, completing these challenges provides powerful rewards like prowess cards (hero upgrades), special units, special tactics, or bane removals (banes are negative effects helping the rival). Prowess rewards are valuable for progression, with most coming from your hero’s personal prowess deck, while others are unlocked from a shared Special Prowess deck available to all heroes. Special units and tactics are another strong reward. They are rare and difficult to obtain but can significantly impact combat.

Bloodshed Events have a simple goal: defeat all rival units in the arena. However, these events are fatal, and any units you lose during the combat are removed from your camp. Careful planning and tactical maneuvers during combat are crucial to minimize casualties. As a reward, you can upgrade one of your hero stats (health or leadership) or gain or upgrade a hero attack die.

Sport Events come in three types:

• King of the Hill: Hold specific hexes (which vary by arena) for a set number of rounds.
• Capture the Flag: Send units to the rival camp to grab a flag and return it to your camp.
• Spar: Defeat all rival units.

Some Sport cards let you choose between event types, while others only offer a specific one. Also, all Sport Events include a rival unit designated as the Tribune. If you defeat the Tribune, your hero drops to 1 health. Avoiding the tribune at all costs adds a challenge to these events.

After succeeding in these events, you can recruit one of the rival unit present in the combat or refill your Tactic Chips as your reward. Unlike Bloodshed Events, Sport Events are not fatal, and defeated units return to your camp. These events are your best way to improve your lineup and recruit better units.

Hero Progress and Ramped-Up Difficulty

Your hero starts the campaign weak and without its elite stats and skills, and it’s your job to upgrade them through events. Balancing Bloodshed, Sport, and Opportunity events is critical because each helps your hero and camp progress differently. Planning your travel path ahead to strike a good balance between events becomes even more important in later acts as the campaign gets increasingly difficult, giving you little room to breathe.

You can skip events you think you can’t win, a choice the game calls Spectating. Spectating heals your hero to full health and doesn’t cost a week, but increases Scion Influence, which adds Bane Chips to the bag or your camp, making the game more difficult. It’s best to avoid Spectating unless absolutely necessary.

Units, Arenas, and Tactics

The game features a wide variety of units, each with unique stats like range, movement, health points, attack dice, and skills. Units native to specific regions gain extra abilities, making them stronger in their home territory. Each of the eight arenas also has its own rules and features, which completely change how combats unfold. Winning combats depends on using units, arena features, and your Tactic Chips effectively.

Review

Hoplomachus: Victorum might seem intimidating at first, but the publisher gets two things exactly right: a well-written rulebook and an excellent tutorial on YouTube. I watched the video first to get a sense of the rules, and when the game arrived, I went through the rulebook. It was an easy read, and I was able to get started quickly. That said, I still made mistakes in my first few plays and had to check the rulebook often, especially for rules around the rival’s priorities for movement and attack. Also, some arena rules described on arena sheets weren’t fully clear, and I had to look them up. That said, this was still one of the easiest experiences I’ve had with a game of this scale and complexity.

The rulebook’s recommendations for your first campaign play a big role in easing you into the game and I strongly recommend following them. You’ll still make mistakes early on, and some edge cases will come up (as they do in many complex games), but after a few plays, everything starts to fall into place. At some point, when rules felt ambiguous, I made judgment calls instead of stressing over every detail. Since this is a solo game, a mistake here or there isn’t a big deal and won’t break your campaign. By the end of your first run, you’ll know the rules and arenas you’ve fought in by heart.

If you enjoy tactical games, you’ll have a blast with this game. Combats are full of tough decisions, and choosing which units to deploy is agonizing every round. Units enter combat dazed, and most cannot move or attack immediately after deployment. This makes deploying units in the right order critical to ensure they survive long enough to contribute. Your hero’s health adds another layer of tension. While all units start each combat at full health, your hero’s health carries over between battles. Healing opportunities outside of Spectating are rare, forcing you to carefully time when to deploy your hero to avoid taking too much damage.

The game offers tons of variety. There are eight different arenas, and combat in each feels entirely unique. One arena has a Chariot that moves around every round, moving units (yours or the rival’s) across the battlefield. Another features shifting columns that block spaces and push units out of position. A third includes a trident that units can throw to deal damage. On top of this, most event cards introduce their own rules and challenges. For example, one Bloodshed Event might let you deploy only one unit but grant it +10 health, while another modifies movement, range, or health for all units. The rival’s lineup also varies depending on event cards: sometimes they bring a small group with Tactic Chips, and other times a large swarm of units without tactics. When you factor in different unit types, their unique skills, Primuses, and the Scion, the combinations are endless, ensuring a different experience with every playthrough.

Combat in Hoplomachus: Victorum revolves around dice rolls and, in most cases, random rival units drawn from a bag. Each die has a different probability of landing a hit. You can upgrade the hero’s dice to improve these odds and make your hero stronger. Units cannot be upgraded this way, but when recruiting them, you see exactly which dice they roll and how much damage they can deal. Despite this, luck still influences the damage you deal and take. Dice rolls can sway a combat, but it rarely determines the campaign’s outcome. A series of bad rolls might cost you units or even an event, but you won’t lose the campaign outright. If your hero is knocked out or you lack enough units, you can use blessings during combat to revive your hero or recruit units from the bag. The only exception is the final Scion battle, a win-or-die situation where blessings are unavailable. I had plenty of “ugh” moments from unlucky rolls in my plays, but just as many cheers when my units landed maximum damage or the rival failed to deal any damage.

Running the rival units is quick and mostly straightforward. During its turn, the rival deploys and moves units, plays a tactic if possible, and attacks. The only confusing part is figuring out movement priorities, which vary by arena and sometimes unit types. Getting these right took a few tries, and I revisited the rulebook and searched BGG forums for clarification a few times. But after getting over the learning curve, managing rival turns becomes fast and effortless.

Pacing is the campaign’s biggest weakness. At first, I dismissed complaints about the length of the campaign since I usually enjoy slow hero progression, but by the middle of Act III, I just wanted to reach the Scion fight. While individual combats average around 20 minutes, you’ll play 30–40 of them, and lingering in a region too long can make combats in the same arena feel repetitive. My full campaign took nearly 13 hours. You can save your progress and resume later, but if you, like me, prefer to finish a game before packing it up, this game will occupy your table for at least a few days. Note that rule lookups and learning arena rules inflated my playtime, but even experienced players will probably need around 9–10 hours to finish a playthrough. The Mercury’s Boots mode in the Pandora’s Ruin expansion directly addresses this issue, which we’ll discuss later.

The components are among the best I’ve seen in any board game. This was my first experience with Chip Theory Games, and despite knowing their reputation for premium components, I was still impressed by the quality during unboxing. The game comes with an excellent component for holding cards and unit chips in front of you during play, trays for organizing chips, and a large neoprene mat with spaces for your camp, rival camp, opportunity cards, and the active event card. The arena mat, where all combat happens, sits at the center of the main mat. Four double-sided neoprene arena mats represent the eight regional arenas.

The weighted chips, a signature of Chip Theory Games, feel fantastic to handle. However, what impressed me most were the PVC components. All cards, Scion sheets, arena sheets, and the skill reference sheet are made of PVC instead of paper. The cards have a premium feel, and since they are nearly indestructible, sleeving them is unnecessary, a relief for someone like me who sleeves everything. That said, two minor improvements could make the experience even better. The cloth bag for rival units is fairly small and becomes too packed in later acts, making shuffling difficult. Also, the health chips are lighter than unit and tactic chips, which led me to accidentally knock over hero or enemy units a few times. While heavier health chips are sold separately, including them in the base game would have been ideal. Despite these nitpicks, the production quality is exceptional. The game is undeniably expensive, but the components will hold up perfectly even after many plays. Combined with its endless replayability, Hoplomachus: Victorum is a strong long-term investment with excellent resale value.

Pandora’s Ruin Expansion

Pandora’s Ruin is a modular expansion designed to add variety and enhance the experience. It introduces major additions, including a Primus Event deck, Mercury’s Boots mode for a faster campaign, and new arena rules.

Face of Evil

This module introduces four new Scions. Each Scion comes with its own bane chips, unit chips, and reference sheets. It does not change the core rules and only adds more Scion options during setup.

Dark Days

Dark Days brings more of the existing components. It includes 10 new special units, 7 new special tactics, 13 special prowess cards, and 117 new event cards. The new special prowess cards are a great addition, introducing new powers and hero upgrade opportunities not available in the base game, expanding the special prowess deck from 7 to 20 cards. The event cards introduce an interesting twist: three cards are added to each event deck based on your chosen Scion. This gives your Scion choice a slight impact on the campaign, though the effect is limited since only a few cards are added, and some of them may never appear during a playthrough. Regardless, this expansion only adds more of the same good things, and there’s absolutely no reason not to mix it with the base game and include it in all plays from the beginning.

Strange Sands

Strange Sands adds much-needed variety to the arenas. It replaces the base game’s four arena reference sheets with eight new sheets, one for each arena. Each sheet has two different rule sets printed on either side. After every combat, you flip the sheet, switching to the alternate rule set for the next battle. This effectively doubles the number of arena configurations and fixes the repetitive arena rules when you stay in the same region for a long time. An excellent addition to the game!

The Rivals

The Rivals module is another excellent addition. While playing the campaign, I found myself wishing for a reference sheet for the Primus combats to avoid checking the rulebook each time. This module goes beyond that, introducing a dedicated event deck for the Primus fights. The lineups are now determined by the event cards, and Primus health is set to the value printed on its chip. You can also enter capital regions and spectate, allowing you to control the deck and discard undesirable Primus events. Each card includes combat modifiers and rules similar to Bloodshed and Sport events, and unlike the base game, act modifiers are now applied to Primus events as well. This module streamlines the rules, adds variety, and is a must-have for the game.

Mercury’s Boots

Mercury’s Boots is the most significant change in this expansion. As mentioned in the base game review, the campaign’s length can be problematic, requiring you to leave the game set up for days. This module addresses that by shortening the campaign from 48 to 24 weeks and allowing you to attempt more Primus combats. Note that the only physical components for this mode are a reference sheet and a new trackpad. These components are already available here, and if you don’t own the expansion, you can print them and play the base game with the new rules.

The shorter campaign means you won’t have as many opportunities to level up, and the game needs to provide ways to progress faster. More blessings during campaign setup and better combat rewards achieve this. You can spend blessings at the start of the campaign to upgrade stats or recruit units immediately. It’s important to balance the number of blessings you use for upgrades, as they act as a safety net in combat throughout the campaign and lower the difficulty when facing the Scion. The setup also adds Scion Bane chips and one unit from each faction to the bag, giving the rival a stronger start as well.

With this mode, your hero gains a Navigation stat, which determines how many spaces you can move per travel action (upgradable to a maximum of 4). This gives you more control over the events you encounter, letting you tailor the campaign to your preferences.

Another new stat, Opportunity Capacity, sets the maximum number of Opportunity cards you can hold and changes the function of these cards. Instead of completing the challenges, you now use Opportunity cards in two ways: discarding them to re-roll dice during combat or claiming their reward after defeating a Primus. The reroll option is fantastic for mitigating bad luck in combat when you are desperate, but I wish it wasn’t tied to Opportunity Cards. The unique challenges that these cards added to combat were something I missed from the base game.

Sport Events have also been updated. Defeating the Tribune now increases Scion Influence instead of reducing your hero’s health to 1 HP. Additionally, you can now both recruit a unit and refill your Tactic Chips as your reward instead of choosing between the two. These changes make Sport Events more fun and rewarding. Bloodshed Events receive a minor tweak as well: Navigation or Opportunity Capacity upgrades are also available as a reward.

Primus encounters are the biggest change to combat in this module. You can now face up to seven Primuses at any time during the campaign, but the more you defeat, the harder the campaign becomes. This replaces the old act-based difficulty scaling with a dynamic system you control. Conversely, avoiding Primus fights makes the final Scion battle more difficult, so planning ahead for these combats and completing enough of them is important. Similar to the base game, both your lineup and the rival’s are predetermined by the rules and change with every Primus you face. Defeating a Primus now provides better rewards, speeding up your progression. While the rules don’t clarify if the Rivals module works with Mercury’s Boots, I combined them anyway, as using the Primus Event Deck made combats much more enjoyable.

Final Thoughts

Hoplomachus: Victorum is one of the best solo games available. With incredible components, engaging combat, and endless variety, it offers countless hours of fun for fans of tactical games. The Pandora’s Ruin expansion makes the game even better by adding more content and fixing the base game’s pacing issues. In particular, Mercury’s Boots mode turns the long campaign into a tighter, faster experience. If you didn’t enjoy the base game, the expansion won’t win you over. But if you loved it or just wanted a shorter campaign, Pandora’s Ruin is a must-have.

Disclosure: We received a review copy of this game. Also, there may be an affiliate link in the links included at the end of this article.