Conquerors

The enemy is close at hand. The time of the final battle draws near.

Your own forces and those of your foe face each other across the dusty plain. Sunlight glints like droplets of fresh blood on bronze shields and polished armour. Swords and spear-tips bristle above the ranks.

Horns and war-drums sound. The troops advance grimly. Each warrior has sworn to fight and even die on your behalf. As their general, you must make sure their sacrifices are not in vain.

To beat your opponent you must strike through to his fortress. Your armies are equally matched in strength, but that is not the only factor that will count in this battle. Luck and skill are even more important.

That was the intro for a series of little books we devised in the late '90s. They were square-format books, quite short, and each page looked a bit like the image (by Russ Nicholson) above. Here's how they were played:

"Find someone else with a Conquerors book and challenge them to a duel.

"You both start at the first spread in the book, where you will see there are four characters to choose from. Holding the book up in front of you, decide secretly which of the four you are sending into battle. When you and your opponent have both chosen, you hold out your books to each other with the character you have chosen facing towards the other person. Reciting your character's catchphrase is optional.

"Now compare the characters to see who wins. For example, say you chose Greebo the Hog and your opponent chose Sir Grim of Grinn. Sir Grim is CAVALRY and Greebo's results table shows that he beats CAVALRY opponents, so you have won that round. The winner moves on to the next spread while the loser remains on the same spread.

"Both of you then decide which character to send into the next round of battle as before. Last round's loser can choose the same character as before if he wishes, or one of the others on that spread.

"If you draw with your opponent, the one who is behind moves on to the next spread. If you draw when you are neck and neck, both of you move on. The winner is the first to win through to the end of their book."

As you see there, we called the series Conquerors (like conkers, geddit?) and although the prototype was done using fantasy characters, we intended you could have all sorts of themes: Wild West, superheroes, horror, gladiators, aliens, and so on. Any book could be used to fight any other book, thus answering the perennial question of schoolboys everywhere: "In a fight between a tyrannosaurus and a tank..."

There are also Battle Plan cards that come with each book. When you lose a round, you can play a Battle Plan to cancel the result of that round. Both you and your opponent then get to replay the round, choosing a character again and revealing your choice as usual.

Battle Plans only work against the character type printed on the card. Your opponent must have chosen a character of that type for you to play the card. Also, once a Battle Plan has been played it is left face down in front of you and cannot be used again in that game.

You can use a maximum of eight Battle Plans in the course of any one game, assuming you have that many to start with. After the game is over, the winning player gets to take one of any Battle Plans that the loser used during that game (picked randomly with the tokens face down). This means that the more games of Conquerors you win, the more Battle Plans you get and the tougher it is to beat you in future...

The reason you never saw a Conquerors book is that publishers, almost without exception, hated the idea. One said, "I cannot conceive of any reason why we would ever publish such a thing."

The exception was Richard Scrivener at Puffin -- the only male editor who we pitched it to, indeed possibly the only man in a senior position in children's publishing back then. Richard saw that boys of 6-10 years would have a lot of fun with something like this in the playground. No, it wasn't going to encourage them to read Sir Walter Scott, nor to abandon their doubtless woeful and (so it was thought then) culturally programmed interest in violence, gusto and gore. It was Top Gear for small boys.

Unfortunately we couldn't get the costings right and the series never got started. Anyway, although designed as books, Conquerors can equally well be played as a card game, and that might be the form in which we finally release it.