Condottiere Review – The Game of Ego, Trash Talk, and Tactical Retreats

Released in 1995, Condottiere is one of my favourite board game titles to say aloud, it’s also old enough to be considered a classic. Set in Renaissance Era Italy, this iconic area-control game has you fighting over impossible-to-pronounce city-states.

In Condottiere, you’re aiming to win battles and take control of 5 different regions, or 3 regions adjacent to one another.

Starting the game with a hand of 10 cards, you use these to build armies and battle within a chosen region. With the winner of the battle taking regional ownership. These battles are sometimes hard-fought, sometimes not since you sometimes go into a fight without a full hand of cards.

Within these battles, everyone takes turns either playing cards or passing. When you pass, you essentially perform a tactical retreat, as you can no longer play cards in the battle. You might do this when you don’t foresee yourself winning the region, or to save your cards for the next battle.

Most of the cards you play are mercenaries, they only add strength to your army. However, you’ll also get special cards that drastically change the battlefield. One example is the Drummer which doubles the strength of all your mercenaries. Another is the Winter card that reduces each Mercenary’s strength to 1.

Eventually, everyone will either pass or run out of cards. At that point, the battle is over. The strongest army wins the region and decides where the next fight takes place.

Before this next battle, you go around the table asking players if they want to discard their hands. Now they might want to, especially if all of their mercenaries are weaker than a fresh-born giraffe, but if they have any mercenaries left at all, they must keep them for the next battle.

Otherwise, if all players discard their hands, then everyone refills back up to 10 cards (plus one for each region they control) before the next battle begins.

To pass or not to pass

There are board games you play because you want to stew in your thoughts, and there are board games you play for fun. Condottiere is one of the latter ones.

Each battle turns into a huge contest of ego, where one player will play a two-strengthed mercenary and then the next will follow immediately with a three-strengthed mercenary. They might even throw in a dab for good measure.

Trying to temper your reaction of playing another two-strengthed mercenary to pause and think about the consequences of the battle is what makes Condottiere so entertaining. Because if you slow down and take a look at the board, it might reveal the battle you’re fighting doesn’t matter.

My enjoyment of Condottiere was less based on the mechanics of the game and more on the well-mannered trash talk that accompanied it. Given luck plays such a large part in the outcome, you can’t take it too seriously.

Despite this luck, you’re given enough cards that you can still pull off great plays and combinations. So no matter what one person throws at you, you can always manage a retort. Unfortunately, this often means you get dragged into battles you’d rather not be in.

This is a lot of fun, but not strategically sound.

One of the reasons for you being dragged into these battles is the Turncoat card. This allows a player to end the battle immediately and score as if everyone passed. Given this, you always want to be leading the battle – just in case.

However, no matter the cards in your hand, the biggest decision you’ll make in each battle is when you should pass.

In Condottiere, you don’t refill your hand until all but one player runs out of cards. You don’t want to be that one player because then you must discard your unspent mercenaries. So to avoid that, you should spend all of your cards. At the same time though, you don’t want to spend all of your hand in the first battles only to then have no cards in the latter ones. So then to avoid that you should pass early on.

Knowing you can’t do both of these at once. It creates this interesting question, one that can only be answered by feeling and responding to the flow of the game.

This is another reason I’ve enjoyed my plays of Condottiere. Everyone is simultaneously answering the same question while making it difficult for everyone else. Then, over the course of several battles, everyone changes their approach and as they do, you need to reevaluate your position.

It’s a chameleon

Another aspect I enjoy about Condottiere is how it zooms in and out on the warring city-states. You zoom in to fight a battle, then zoom out to figure out if a player has won or lost the game. This is surprisingly effective at creating natural climaxes throughout the game.

Something else to know about Condottiere is how different it plays at each player count. Outside of two-player games, which I don’t recommend, each player count is a lot of fun but for different reasons.

At three players, you generally get two or three battles and you normally go all in pretty quickly. So there’s a larger focus on using your hand effectively. Trying to win fights early, or go all in if you see another player unrelenting. Because it doesn’t make much sense if you go hard on one battle and leave yourself crippled for the next.

Meanwhile, at 4-6 players, there are so many cards spread across everyone that you generally have a lot more battles in between refilling. This puts significantly more pressure on you to get that play-or-pass decision right.

Condottiere has been in my collection for a while and still sees fairly regular play. Largely because its rules are easy to parse and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Yet there are always enough interesting decisions to keep you engaged, no matter your experience level.

Ultimately, what Condottiere lacks in deterministic outcomes, it makes up for in friendly goading and trash talk, and that makes it a board game I’ll continue to enjoy for another 25 years.