Lords of Conquest

Lords of Conquest is a strategy game for one to four players, in which the goal is to fight for control of territory on a map made up of continents and seas. Players take turns occupying territory, building armies, ships, and resource mines, trying to dominate as much of the map as possible both militarily and economically—the game somewhat resembles board strategy games like Risk, but with its own rules for resource extraction and unit construction. The map is also generated differently every time, so players can't plan their starting positions in advance and must react to whatever continents and resources chance assigns them. Resources such as iron, horses, or wood determine which units a player can afford to build, so managing territory is just as important as the combat clashes themselves.

On the Commodore 64, the game relies on a clear map and simple, quickly understood controls, which made it popular as a game for multiple players taking turns at a single computer. The turn-based system leaves room for planning, but a match doesn't lose pace, since individual rounds are short and focused on key decisions about expansion and territorial defense. It was precisely the combination of simple rules and a changeable map that made the game a popular choice both for quick matches among friends and for longer tactical duels, in which the border between individual players gradually took shape.

The Ozark Softscape team, again led by Danielle Bunten Berry, was in the mid-1980s one of the few studios systematically dedicated to multiplayer strategy games for home computers. Lords of Conquest is remembered today mainly as a carefully tuned multiplayer title that showed even an eight-bit computer could offer deep strategic fun for a group of players at a single screen, without requiring a complicated manual or lengthy learning curve, making it easy to return to even years later without detailed knowledge of the rules.

Why play it: If you're looking for a deep yet easy-to-grasp multiplayer strategy game for a group at one screen, it plays without needing to study a thick manual even years later.