Hear me out; this game is better than it looks. I know, I know, I don’t love that cover either, but once you get inside, this game really does come alive.

Conquest Princess is a cooperative bag-building game with elements of boss-battling and collection.  This game was on Gamefound back in June 2023.  It had a fairly small pledge group of about 668 people but it did succeed in being funded.  I went all in!  I got the base box, plus the mat, plus the acrylic tokens, and the bags!

If I were to describe this game to you, I would describe it as The Captain is Dead (which is a cooperative space game we reviewed here, here, and here) meets a bag-builder like Invincible (a cooperative bag-builder we reviewed here).  

Let’s take a look!

Extra Specials

I am very pleased I went all-in on this; I got some pretty great stuff.  Normally, I worry that a game with such a small crowdfunding presence won’t have great all-in stuff, but boy was I pleasantly surprised!  I am SO PLEASED with the extras!

This is a bag-building game, remember?

This upgraded “extra” bag is fantastic! 

It can even stand-up on its own! See above!

And the acrylic tiles that come with it are gorgeous! Bag of Destiny: totally worth it.

Standees of Utmost Elegance?  Very good!  Anyone who know follows this blogs knows that I love the acrylic standees, even over miniatures! The acrylic standees from Tokyo Sidekick (see here) and from Kinfire Chronicles (see here) have convinced me that I prefer the acrylic standees!

The Standees of Utmost Elegance box comes with a bunch of standees (right), bases (middle) and some acrylic danger tokens (left): see above.

All assembled, those look pretty great! See above!  The art is a little cartoony, but I think that’s why the clear acrylic standees work so well in this game; they accent that comicy nature!  I am very very happy with The Standees of Utmost Elegance!  I wish the art was just a touch nicer, but I still liked it.

Look at all that great acrylic standee stuff!

The third and final box is the coolest: Lights Of Opulent Extravagence!  

It includes metal first player token (right: above) and 16 action coins (left). Wow!

More importantly, it includes the light-up standees.  You heard me.  Light-up standees!

Each character can “transform” in the game, and when they do, they get the cool light-up standee! See above!

The extra specials for this game gave me a WOW and put a giant smile on my face!  This is the feeling I wanted when I opened Freedom Five from a few weeks ago.  I got that WOW feeling from Conquest Princess instead!!

Totally worth getting the extras and all-in. 

Upgraded components are great, but what about the game?

Unboxing and Some* Unpunching Required

The base box is fairly tall, but width and height is pretty standard. See Coke can above for perspective.

I sort of had a weird dillema when I opened everything up!  A lot of the tokens are already acryclic, so which ones do I punch out?

So, I ended up punching out about half  the cardboard punchouts; the other half were from the acrylic standees and metal tokens.

I mean, everything looks pretty cool, right?

Gameplay

1 to 4 Players assume the roles of the 4 characters in the game: see above and below.

This is an action point game; actions are notated on the Wrist Blaster board (bottom board in photo above). Each character gets 4 action points on their turn, denoted by the metal tokens.  The player will slide the token down to indicate a move, shoot, or engage action.  Occasionally, you can use energy to get an extra action (last column).   The armor on the side is armor to prevent damage.

The Fashion Plate board (above and below) is where you place special cards, pets, and powers. 

This game is a space game with a large dollop of fashion in the theme!  You heard me, fashion!!! One of the catch phrases of the game is “Fashion is Power!!”  Generally, this is a space game, where some of the equipment you’d get in a pure space game is instead accented as fashion accessories.  

You can see a little of that in the gear (I mean fashion accessories) above: Carbonite Kicks, Hsi Sniper Sleeves.  It’s more fashion accessories than gear, but it’s also gear.

I’ll say this: if you want to play Conquest Princess as a pure, straight-up space-theme game, you can almost ignore the fashion part and just pretend it’s a pure space-themed game. But if you really want to embrace the “Fashion is Power!” vibe, you can have a lot of fun with that.  This weird cross-pollination of space and fashion may seem like a turn-off, but it’s not; you can choose to embrace either side (or both sides!) of that theme and it still works.  I generally played it solo as a pure space game; whereas my cooperative games with my girl friends embraced the fashion part.

The T.I.A.R.A (above) is generally the main ship and this is where I get a lot of The Captain is Dead vibe from! Players move around the ship taking out the Minions in orange thongs (yes, you heard me right, orange thongs) and keeping the ship clear of baddies.

The ship has all sorts of different subsystems: Teleporter (above: for moving off ship), Engineering (above: for repairing subsystems), Mendenry (above: sick-bay), Comms (below: show upcoming bad news cards) and finally the Wardrobe (below: the weapons sills).

If the minions get attacks off while in the ship, they put those subsystems into disrepair.  See above as the Wardrobe has been critically damaged!    Keeping the ship healthy and in repair is a huge deal; it keeps your systems active.   Every single one of these subsystems is useful! Healing! Better gear (I mean fashion accessories)! Looking ahead at Bad News! Teleportation! 

Those of you who have played The Captain is Dead (see board above) will find this subsystem stuff very familiar!

If all you did was keep baddies off the ship, the game wouldn’t be very interesting! In the Standard Game, you have to worry about two planets where stuff is happening! On Planet 1  (standard game) is the Invasion! See above!

On Planet 2 is the Mechapede!  

These Planets do change: in the Advanced game, there is the Dark Portal (see above).

So, while you are keeping baddies off your ship, you are also teleporting to the planets to achieve your mission goals!  Sometimes your missions are to collect items, sometime your missions are to keep the chaos on planets under control, and sometimes your mission is to move to the Dark Portal! 

What you do depends on which of 4 scenarios you are playing! See the four scenarios that come with the box above! For the record, you can play any of the scenarios, but it’s recommended you play them in order as a campaign from Tutorial, Standard Mission, Advanced Mission, to Boss Battle! The game just gets harder and harder!

So, Conquest Princess is a balancing act of keeping the ship free of baddies, the planets under control, and staying alive!  

This game has a peculiar, but consistent and interesting loss mechanic: you cannot lose unless you run out of power!  You only run out of power if the Power Up deck (above) is ever empty! It starts with 28 cards!

But every time something goes bad that would immediately end the game (where a character takes a third damage, or too many minions overrun the ship, etc, etc) instead you take a disruption!  Your ship has a time-travel mechanism to prevent the bad thing, but the cost to stopping the badness is huge!  A disruption causes players to discards Power Up cards equal to the Danger Level (most games start with a Danger Level of 2: see above), and every disruption increases the Danger Level by 1!  If you ever can’t discards enough cards to handle a disruption, players immediately lose!

I like this loss mechanism, as it scales, it is simple to explain, and handles all endgame cases consistently.  There is only one loss mechanism; just don’t run out of of power!!!

If players can collectively succeed in their quests before the power runs out, they win!

Comic/Tutorial/Scenario Book

There’s quite a bit of reading material.

The comic book is just flavor for the adventures; you don’t have to read it.

I found the art inconsistent with the rest of the game (see above), so I thought it actually detracted from the experience.  My friends read it while I was making dinner and they said it offered some nice thematic basis; they liked it.   Read it if you want, you don’t have to.

The Tutorial, on the other hand, was AMAZING!  See above!  It walks the players through the first 3 rounds of the game very explicitly!   You ABSOLUTELY must and should read the playthrough from the Tutorial!  This does what a great Tutorial does; explain what you can do, what you shouldn’t do, and make you feel like you can play without needing too much of the rulebook!  The Tutorial is a shining star in this game.

Finally, the Scenario Book (not particularly well marked, above) has the directions for play and set-up for the other three scenarios in the game.   It was … okay.   There are a LOT of new rules in later scenarios, and it could have done a little better job explaining some stuff.  I think it just needed some more edge cases explained.    I think you will be going on BoardGameGeek a lot for these scenarios to look up rules.  In general, this scenario book was ok.

Rulebook

This rulebook is generally okay.  It has some flaws but some nice features too.

See above as it flops over the edges on the chair next:  it’s not great.  I’d give this a D in the Chair Test: the fonts are good, the pictures are good, but the rulebook is just too big and can’t sit on the chair next to me; it flops over the edges. See above!!

We’ve seen this “rulebook-too-large” problem a lot lately (See our  Batman: Gotham City Chronicles and Tidal Blades 2 reviews): luckily, there’s a decent workaround! Put it on TWO chairs next to you (with the spine in the middle so it stays open). See above.

I wanted to like this rulebook; it has a good-sized font, lots of pictures, and even an Index! At the end of the day, I didn’t love it.  I feel like there were some edge cases missing, and I didn’t like the way the certain things were expressed.  But, they made a good faith effort to make a good rulebook, so I will say this was good enough.

In a Second Edition of the game, I want another pass by an editor please. And a smaller form factor, please.

Solo Play

If you get the player Mat with the game, recognize that it is two-sided.  One side has the set-up for SOLO play: see above.  That’s the way I played.  For the record, this is THE BIGGEST player mat I have (even bigger than Robinson Crusoe: Collector’s Edition from a few months back!!).

So there is a solo mode!  (Thanks for following Saunders’ Law!) Unfortunately, like Heroes’ Resistance, Set A Watch, or Cyber Pet Quest (from last week), the solo character must control all 4 characters!  In fact, no matter the player count, all 4 characters must be in play.

Of course, a 4-character solo play isn’t ideal; there is context-switching overhead as you switch from character to character (you play one character at a time), there is extra maintenance as you play (as typically the maintenance scales linearly with the number of characters), and there is simple intellectual pressure to use all four characters well together.

I will say that Conquest Princess works well as a solo game if you like a longer solo game and if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order (we’ll discuss this down below).  Conquest Princess is  basically a puzzle to solve with spinning plates: you try to keep the bag in a good state (remember, this is a bag-building game), while keep the ship and planets under control.

Solo, I have now played the Tutorial once, the Standard Games about 4 times, and the Advanced Game once.  The Tutorial was relatively quick, but the Standard and Advanced Games were pretty long games, taking about 2 to 2.5 hours each.  

The extra context switching and maintenance overhead tends to elongate the solo game that much more! The box says 45-70 minutes? No way. It’s at least 2 to 2.5 hours for a solo game.  

But, I feel like every step matters in this solo game: each character gets 4 actions (5 if you waste a power token), and each turn matters!  What’s the best way to keep the chaos under control AND keep the bag in good shape?

I liked the solo game.  A lot.  It was fun trying to figure out how to keep the characters working well together.   And the solo game did a really good job at teaching the game so I could teach my friends. Again, that Tutorial is phenomenal for the solo player (and the cooperative players).

Cooperative Play

The other side of the Player Mat made the weird choice to have no set-up information or templates for the cooperative: it has only flavor text and pictures.   It wasn’t too bad, but I thought it was busy (from a graphic design perspective) and got in the way just a little bit.  It was fine, but the Mat for the solo mode was much more helpful. See above.

Cooperative play at 2 and 4  players is ideal: in 2-Player mode, each player operates two characters. In 4-Player mode, each player gets their own character!

Unfortunately, 3-Player mode makes one player operate two characters (which is usually me, since I have played the game more than anyone).  

Whereas my solo plays embraced the pure space game, my cooperative plays embraced the fashion parts!  That is probably because I played with the two friends Sara and Teresa!

There’s a decent amount of discussion going on as you play, as players need to figure out how to work together and share their fashion plates.

For example, players WANT to be on the same space as the Green character because then they can do multiple ENGAGE actions (usually, a single ENGAGE ends your turn).  So, sometimes players may travel in packs to reuse their Fashion Plates!  But then, you can’t get enough done if you stay together, so sometimes they have to split up!  What’s the best thing to do?   The sharing of Fashion Plates and that discussion really does facilitate the cooperation in the game.

The Tutorial also worked fantastically in the cooperative game! Players would read the parts of the tutorial relevant to their character and then act it out!  Again, this tutorial worked really well.

And the cooperative game also moved along a little faster, as there was shared maintenance, and each character had the agency of a single player!   The game still feels a little longer than 45-70 minutes, but it was definitely shorter than the solo game.

Generally, my friends had fun and want to play again.  One major complaint was that the rulebook wasn’t great for edge cases (a similar complaint we had initially: see as Sara tries to find a ruling and fails).

Player Order

In the rulebook and rules (page 8 above), there is an entire page discussing player order and who is Lead Agent (first player).  The rules are complex and they depend on something called “LOAD” and how many players are playing.  If there is any question about LOAD then players select. What is LOAD? LOAD is a messy notion about the number of MISS tokens on your board.

See above as the RED player has too much LOAD, so probably can’t go first.

We need to get real for a second.  I like this game.  A lot.  but there is a LOT of randomness that can detract from me liking this game.  There is just enough mitigation between bag maintenance and special powers and so on to keep me involved.  But I am on the cusp.    The rules for first player need to be completely streamlined: it’s too much intellectual effort and it feels … random.  “Oh, I should go first, but I can’t because I drew poorly and got LOAD last turn??”  No no no no no no no.  

This game needs Player Selected Turn Order:  players simply should simply decide the order they play on their turn.  This will allow characters to support each other to feel like they have gigantic turns!  Get the RED character to help you so you shoot better; get the GREEN character to move to you so you can ENGAGE twice!  These are decisions the PLAYERS should make, not have some esoteric mechanism (Lock and Load and LOAD) deciding player order.

Blow away all the rules for player order (an entire page in the rulebook) and just let the players decide what order they want to go!  This makes the game that more cooperative as players will now discuss the order they should go!  It helps cooperation!!  Without Player Selected Turn Order, this game becomes too random for me and I would give it a 6 or 6.5/10.  With Player Selected Turn Order, I feel powerful, potent, cooperative, and engaged! And the game is much better, an 8/10 or 8.5/10.  It makes THAT big a different for me.

Yes, this is a House Rule.  Play with or without it, but I suspect you like the game that much more with Player Selected Turn Order.  Decide for yourself.

What I Liked

Acrylic Standees: If you can get Acrylic Standees, I would recommend it. They really complement the comicy vibe of the game, and they just look great on the table.

Transformation: It’s very cool when you transform!  If you have the light-up standees, that makes it even cooler, but it is such a cool moment in the game when a character transforms to their super!  The character gets an immediate power, becomes more powerful, and heals up!  It feels like a movie moment when a character becomes powerful just in time to save the crew!

Components: Even if you just get the retail version of the components, the components are still nice. I am very glad I got all the premium upgrades, but that’s up to you.

Bag Maintenance: This is a bag-building game, and you have to keep the bag in shape! If you have too many “MISS” tokens in the bag, you just won’t be able to do well you attack, so you have to make sure to keep as many “HIT” tokens in the bag as possible! You may to use the COMMS ENGAGE action to scoop up all the HOT tokens on the ship, or take out one line of the MECHAPEDE to put all those hit tokens in the bag! As you go around, you must keep the bag state in mind or you will lose! Even if you do draw MISS tokens (see above), you can trade them for POWER tokens in future turns! (You can use POWER tokens for future actions or to transform!). I love that!! Even if you fail, you can still do something good LATER in the game! I hated Freedom Five from a few weeks ago because all failures were independent … at least here, a Failure can bring you choice! (And putting a failure on your board keeps it out of the bag too! Maybe you keep it out of the bag just to help your friends!!)

There are just enough mechanisms in the game to help you keep the bag state under control that you feel like you have agency in how the bag is. I love that; It doesn’t feel too random.

Star Trek Vibe: There is a Star Trek vibe here in Conquest Princess. Just like The Captain is Dead. Now, I love The Captain is Dead, but it was always centered on the ship only, and Star Trek is all about beaming down to the Planet. Here, in Conquest Princess, we can beam to TWO planets! And they are very different! I feel like Conquest Princess does a pretty good job of embracing that Star Trek vibe.

Sense of Humor: This game has an sense of humor. Wardrobe Malfunction as a card name? Ha! It’s even thematic as you lose your core suit. There are little bits like this all over the game.

Play How You Want: Play this as either a pure space game or embrace the fashion aspects, or both! If you don’t like the fashion aspect, don’t let it drive you away: this is a good space game.

What I Didn’t Like

Rulebook: The rulebook and scenario book need some work; mostly edge cases need to be specified more.  There were just too many times when it wasn’t “clear” what needed to done or how to deal with something.  I’ll give the rulebook credit; they did a lot of things right.  It’s just that each scenario has SO MANY rules, it’s hard to get everything right.

Turn Order: Jettison the entire set of rules for player order and lead player (an entire page!) and just use Player Selected Turn order. It’s simpler to explain and makes the game more cooperative. The game even makes it easy to notate as you have to move the action tokens!

Conclusion

Conquest Princess was a bit of surprise! I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did!  At first it looks like just a pure space  themed game, but it has a strange auxiliary fashion theme which you can choose to embrace or not!  So, don’t be turned off by some of the fashion references; you can play this as a pure space game and still really enjoy it!  Or you can embrace the fashion theme wholesale!

There are so many great things about this game; from the Transformations, the bag-building, keeping the ship intact, keeping the bag well-seeded, helping each other, and communicating!  There are no communication limits in this game, thus players can work together well!

I can’t recommend this game unless you jettison the turn-order and first-player rules; they are complicated, messy, full of exceptions, and take up an entire page (page 8) in the rulebook.  With the turn-order rules as-is, I would probably give this game a 6 or 6.5/10: those action rules are too complex and make the game too random so that players can’t support each other!  If, instead, you throw away page 8 of rules and instead embrace Player Selected Turn Order, this game moves to an 8 or 8.5/10!  When players support each other, the game feels more engaging! Players have more agency!  Players have more powerful turns!  Players communicate more!  Yes, this is a house rule, but I think it’s critical if you are considering this game.

I love all the upgrades they have for this game, and maybe you will too; just be aware it’s a fair chunk of change to get all the upgrades.

Despite the 4-character solo mode, I had lots of fun playing this as a solo game.  This may make my Top 10 Solo Games of 2024!

So, there it is; I like this game and would recommend it but only if you embrace Player Selected Turn Order.  I guess it’s not a surprise I liked this game: it’s basically the Captain is Dead meets Invincible, and I love both of those games.