Miguel Marqués' design for Hispania comes as something of a, very pleasant, surprise. It comes in a modest size box from publishers Draco Ideas and you might think at first glance that it's maybe an abstract wargame with a thematic veneer. First impressions aren't always correct, however. Hispania may be heavily abstracted but it does a surprisingly good job in enabling a range of historical scenarios.
There's an option to play competitively with a fourth player controlling revolts in the Hispanic cities, but Hispania is primarily intended as a solitaire or fully cooperative game for up to three players. The players represent Roman generals embarking on the conquest of Iberia. The game is played on a board divided into provinces and showing 44 cities and 5 sea areas, and with links that indicate the way in which each connects to neighbouring areas. To win, the players need to have a garrison in the capital of each of the six Hispanic provinces, and they need to achieve this within a maximum of 11 rounds.
Each round, players spend denarii to take their actions (and the game comes with metal replica denarii coins). Players need tho' to deal with the revolts that spring up in ungarrisoned cities, and Hispanic armies that are formed when an uprising occurs in a city already in revolt. Hispanic armies go on the move, and they spread revolt Pandemic-style, initially just in their own province but venturing into a neighbouring province once their entire province is in revolt. The discs used to mark revolts are also used to keep track of rounds, and players lose if ever there isn't a token left to place out on the turn track. This simple mechanic gives a clear arc to each game, with an ever-increasing potential for revolt/turn-track tokens to run out. As Miguel Marqués points out in the rulebook, this represents the attrition of war becoming increasingly onerous for Rome.
Attacks and sieges are resolved with d6 dice and the expenditure of denarii, and unless you're playing the 3 vs 1 competitive game, the location of revolts is generated by die rolls, so there's inevitably an element of luck in the game, but there's ample scope for strategy and, certainly, the Roman generals will need to work effectively together to have a chance of seizing victory. There are strategic decisions to be taken, for example, on the most advantageous places to build roads, which extend a general's movement.
The rules for Hispania are refreshingly straightfoward, so this is a game you can play pretty much out of the box with no heavy rules overhead. That said tho', Draco Ideas have delivered a remarkably versatile package: you can adjust the difficulty level of the basic game and you can mix and match any combination of the several optional rule variants. We've especially enjoyed playing with the Ingenium rules that switch road building so that it's a possible action (at a cost in denarii) during a player's turn rather than at set up.
And there's more, the game incorporates five additional scenarios, each with their own particular set up and variant rules to simulate Roman campaigns over the 200 or so years between 197 BC and 19 BC . It all makes for a compact wargame package that way exceeded our expectations.