You probably know Triominos. The game with the bakelite, triangular tiles with numbers. Players place the tiles like triangular dominoes to score points. This game is in almost every game and/or toy cupboard in the Netherlands, just like Monopoly, Candyland and Sorry!, but hardly anyone knows how this game got there. Was it your parents? Your grandparents? The neighbor? The milkman? The ghost in your Ouija board? Or your nephew after all? Anyway, everyone knows how it’s played. Time for a new version?
I must confess that the original Triominos may not be for me. It involved a lot of math and this lawyer is not hindered by any mathematical knowledge. The scoring always felt like homework to me, so I preferred to play games like Key to the Kingdom. Triominos Conquest is played similarly to the original, but there is big difference: different scoring which means you don’t have to do constant math!
In Triominos Conquest, you try to conquer the largest area with your so-called cover tiles: colorful shapes that consist of a plurality of triangles and are easily placed on the Triominos tiles. Each player receives a holder of Triominos tiles, cover tiles and in the center of the table a stack of Triominos tiles is placed.
At the beginning of the game, a tile is placed on the table and each turn a player places a tile from their supply by placing it on an existing tile. The numbers in the corners of the placed side(s) must match. If you can’t place a tile? There the rules did not offer a solution so we used the rules of standard Triominos. By the way, in Conquest you always take a new tile as opposed to the normal game.
If you have placed a tile and this new tile makes a shape of 2, 4, or 6 tiles, you can cover it with your cover tiles. You can even “chase away” other colored tiles previously placed by placing a larger one. When all of a player’s cover tiles or the Triominos tiles in the general draw pile are depleted, the game ends and players add up the points in the conquered territory. The player with the most points prevails!
For fans of the classic game, Triominos Conquest is sure to offer an interesting variation on a familiar game concept. Due to the relatively small amount of tiles that all have unique compositions of points, it did not yet occur to us that the largest shape was placed. Laying out is the same as in Triominos and Domino and therefore still largely dependent on a dose of luck. As with the original, you’re mostly staring to place your tiles appropriately and this leaves a little less room for strategy, which would suit a game where you want to conquer territories. Triominos Conquest does remove a threshold from the original, namely the math. Otherwise, Conquest is especially suitable for fans of Triominos on familiar game concepts who do dare a slight variation.
