Expeditions: Conquistador

Expeditions: Conquistador is a hybrid tactical role-playing and strategy game developed by Logic Artists and later published by THQ Nordic that places players in command of a 16th-century Spanish expedition to the New World. Rather than romanticizing conquest as a simple tale of victory and expansion, the game frames exploration as a tense balancing act between ambition, survival, diplomacy, and internal cohesion. From the beginning, it is clear that success is not measured solely by winning battles, but by how well you manage people, resources, and difficult moral choices in an unfamiliar and often hostile land.
The game is structured around an overland campaign map where movement, planning, and logistics are just as important as combat. Each journey across jungles, coastlines, and mountains consumes time and supplies, forcing players to think carefully about routes and priorities. Camps must be established at the end of each day, where you assign party members to tasks such as hunting, guarding, scouting, or healing. Random events frequently occur during these moments of rest, presenting narrative decisions that can improve morale, cost valuable resources, or spark conflict within the expedition. This system gives the campaign layer a constant sense of tension, as even periods of apparent calm can have long-term consequences.
Character creation and party management form a core pillar of the experience. Players create their expedition leader with a range of skills that directly influence dialogue options, exploration outcomes, and camp events. Attributes such as diplomacy, leadership, medicine, survival, and tactics are not abstract numbers but meaningful tools that open or close paths throughout the game. The wider expedition is made up of companions drawn from different classes, including soldiers, scouts, hunters, doctors, and scholars. Each brings unique combat roles and non-combat benefits, making recruitment and squad composition a strategic decision rather than a cosmetic one. Personalities and morale matter, reinforcing the idea that the expedition is a fragile social unit rather than a disposable army.
Tactical combat takes place on hex-based maps that emphasize positioning, terrain, and coordinated actions over brute force. Encounters are deliberate and methodical, encouraging careful use of cover, flanking, and class abilities. Soldiers anchor the front lines, scouts maneuver for mobility and disruption, hunters apply ranged pressure, doctors keep the party alive, and scholars manipulate the battlefield through support abilities. Combat is tightly linked to the campaign layer, as injuries persist beyond individual fights and require time and medical resources to heal. Reckless victories can leave the expedition weakened and vulnerable in the long run, reinforcing the game’s emphasis on sustainability over aggression.
Narrative and choice play a significant role throughout the journey. Dialogue is heavily skill-based, with options appearing or disappearing depending on the leader’s abilities and the composition of the party. Diplomacy can resolve conflicts without bloodshed, establish alliances with native factions, or reshape how future encounters unfold. While the game draws inspiration from historical themes, it allows players agency in how events play out, offering opportunities to pursue more cautious, cooperative approaches rather than defaulting to domination. These choices often have delayed consequences, lending weight to decisions that might initially seem minor.
Visually, Expeditions: Conquistador is functional rather than extravagant. The art style prioritizes clarity, ensuring that maps, units, and interfaces are readable and easy to navigate during both exploration and combat. While the graphics may feel modest by modern standards, they support the game’s systems without distraction. Sound design and music are similarly restrained, reinforcing atmosphere without overpowering the experience, and allowing the narrative and mechanics to remain front and center.
The game’s learning curve is steep, particularly in the early hours. Systems overlap and interact in ways that can overwhelm new players, and early mistakes can have lasting repercussions. However, this complexity is also one of the game’s greatest strengths. Once the systems click, the experience becomes deeply rewarding, offering a sense of authorship over the expedition’s fate that few strategy RPGs achieve. Each campaign feels shaped by the player’s priorities, skill choices, and moral stance, encouraging replayability through experimentation with different leadership styles.
Overall, Expeditions: Conquistador stands as a thoughtful and ambitious blend of tactical combat, resource management, and narrative choice. It is not a power fantasy, nor a simple strategy game, but a measured exploration of leadership under pressure. Players willing to invest time into understanding its interconnected systems will find a rich and immersive experience that values planning, empathy, and foresight as much as battlefield success. For fans of historical RPGs and strategy hybrids that challenge both tactical skill and ethical judgment, it remains a distinctive and rewarding title.
Rating: 7/10

Decent low-budget game.
– Solid turn-based tactical battles. Battles can be challenging.
– Interesting exploration (within budget limits).
– Quest choices matter.
Few words about music. On one hand, the world exploration theme gets repetitive. On the other hand, the battle track is great.
About battle locations: I like that the developers create different arenas for different environments, and not just a few locations on repeat.
From start to finish, in almost all aspects of the game you can see that the developers worked with a small budget, but they wanted to show their best.
Definitely a game worth a try.
P.S
I hate night raids on camp.

Bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's extremely engaging and fun to explore and battle and role play as a conquistador and make decisions that really matter and affect the outcome. If you like turn based squad strategy and historical games, check it out.

Don Felipe Valdez the Conquistador set out to the New World, made a stop at Hispaniola where his ship was embargoed by the local governor who wanted to strong-arm him into doing his bidding but was vastly underestimating Don Felipe's terrible grasp of the game mechanics, which resulted on every single NPC he met in that island dying due to wounds, diseases or main plot-related reasons, his entire crew abandoning him after engaging in mutiny not once but twice even if Don Felipe managed to B.S. his way into convincing them to not mutiny the first time, and the local Spanish rebel uprising against King Carlos ultimately toppling said governor and killing every authority figure Don Felipe befriended during his brief stay at the island.
So off went Don Felipe to mainland America to cause even more chaos for friend and foe alike having concluded this prologue/tutorial section of the game and accidentally caused the death of the first plot-important NPC.
It's been a long time since I've played a game that allows you to screw up every single important objective and mission while you're learning the mechanics, but instead of a game over screen, it adjusts to let you keep playing and facing the results of your unmitigated dumbarsery. And the beautiful thing is that it cost me less than one buck.
Amazing. I can't wait to be the worst viking since Tim Robbins' Erik the Red, and a terrible roman general worthy of Monty Python's Life of Brian in the two sequels.

The camera controls are a little bit janky at times and the world map portions of the game can start to feel like a chore with all the marching back and forth, but the game makes up for that with an engaging story, character interactions, immersive art and music, and a battle system which is easy to learn but hard to master. Despite playing who knows how many fights throughout a full playthrough, I never got bored of it or felt like it was getting repetitive.

Not the greatest game in this sort of genre by far, but worth picking up, especially if the time period and setting are interesting to you. 7/10

a fun historical crpg, not too long and not too short with a good amount of depth so it never really feels like a slog to go through, the battles are awesome especially the main story ones. the cairns around the map(s) can be a bit of a pain to look for but overall the game's fantastic 8/10

This game is super underrated! It’s worth waiting for a sale.

You play as a faceless, generic conquistador who has to make decisions in various situations. I had fun playing both the “good” and “evil” conquistador paths.