Pros

Dune as a whole is getting a new spark with the 2021 movie, and this box did a great job of letting anyone, new or old to the IP, feel at home here. The planet is prominently shown, and the characters from the movie are the leaders to play. And the game overall is incredibly easy to pick up and learn.

This wouldn’t be any sort of homage to the original Dune 1979 (and Dune 2019) without asymmetry, and the 4 houses are great, ranging from Atriedes Prescience to see your opponents’ combat plans, to of course Harkonnen getting a bunch of Traitors to instantly win combats.

Playing the Fremen specifically is like playing a different game, where they never have to ship in forces from outer space, they just spawn 5 forces for free very turn. Pair that with how they are real good at moving across the planet, so they can move 6 spaces instead of 3, OR they can move 2 groups 3 spaces each!

This game seems to never let up the pedal to the metal in pacing. Even though no one can ‘win’ on the first or second rounds, you still want to pressure Strongholds, since if you have 2 of them early game, well you can easily just blitz another Stronghold to quickly win the game. Or the Fremen can move TWO legions across the board to attack twice!

This is all while the Traitor mechanic is at the back of everyone’s head for fights, spice is hoarded for victory points at game end, and the game ends in an hour! An hour!

Dune Conquest is still able to ooze plenty of theme meets gameplay for its runtime. Legions are fighting to the death over strongholds to win or prevent wins. Fremen are dashing around the map. You can get killed by the Sandworm while trying to avoid the storm. Paul is using Prescience. The Reverend Mother (working for the Imperium faction here) is using the voice. Lasgun + Shield is gonna be a giant explosion that kills everything.

Nitpicks

One of our biggest nitpicks is still the Traitor-ing mechanic.

There is no true mechanic to learn which Leaders are Traitors, and especially early game, you have little idea whether or not you’re gonna get Traitor-ed, UNLESS you picked one of your own Leaders, but that can hurt your chances of upsetting your opponents in the future. Traitors is inherently just a very swingy mechanic where you can lose your strongest Leader, and the winner gets spice for that Leader’s strength, and keeps ALL their troops alive.

Then, watch out for the Slow Dart card that is too good at closing out games during end game combat, of which can’t be counterplayed and turns an opponents’ Leader to 0 power. So it basically takes an opposing Leader out of the fight, and that opponent can’t ever do anything about it.

Final Thoughts

But hey, we want to stress that Dune Conquest patched up a lot of our problems with the original, much longer Dune formula of 2019. A couple of big cons with Dune 2019 were that Traitors are too swingy for how long and punishing the game is, the runtime wasn’t consistent AT ALL, leading to 2 hour or 6 hour games, and the game had so much rule jank that we weren’t even sure which set of rules to follow.

Yet this more casual-friendly Dune Conquest has no sweeping theme or large-scale machinations: no more blind auctions, no more Bene Gesserit or Spacing Guild factions, no more Alliance cards, meaning no joint victories… so if you want LOTS of diplomacy, there’s not THAT much here, there’s some, but don’t be too fooled by the game having ‘diplomacy’ in its name.