Hispania is a small, lavish cooperative conquest simulator that delivers real crunch

Hispania, from Draco Ideas, is a focused and abstract historical strategy game that casts players as Roman praetors (and maybe a consul) tasked with subduing the Iberian Peninsula over the course of two centuries.

Hispania is a primarily cooperative game with massively customisable difficulty and asymmetric resistance packed into a tight, hour-long experience that’s far more nuanced than its runtime suggests. Whether you’re forging the empire or fighting to stop it,  it offers a compelling look at one of Rome’s most stubborn frontiers.

Set in the aftermath of the Second Punic War, the game begins in 201 BC, with Rome victorious over Hannibal and now turning its gaze westward. The peninsula is fractured — home to dozens of tribes, each of which has sworn to resist the imperial heel. Your goal, as Rome, is to pacify these regions before the turn of the millennium, emulating the campaigns of Caesar Augustus (and his predecessors) and transforming Hispania into a stable province of the empire. But the game doesn’t make it easy — resistance is ever-present, and the clock is always ticking.

Mechanically, Hispania is a hybrid of area control, hand management, and tactical movement that will feel familiar to anyone who knows the Pandemic system — although I hasten to add that Hispania is not a Pandemic game. Players deploy legions and march them across Hispania before facing down Spanish revolts wherever they arise — rolling dice to overcome opposing forces of varying strength depending on the number of tokens in them. Each action costs coins, and in perhaps the most overproduced component ever seen in a game this size, Hispania comes with actual metal coins fantastically stamped in the ancient style.

Hispania includes over 240 difficulty variations, allowing players to scale the challenge from introductory skirmishes to full-blown historical simulations. Customisations include recommended settings for how many coins (actions) you’ll have per turn, how many roads (allowing faster movement) begin on the board and so on. Swing all of these to “hard” and you’ll have no chance. If you swing them to easy then experienced wargamers should be OK.

What’s most impressive is how it handles its dual modes. In cooperative play, players work together to manage Rome’s expansion; coordinating campaigns among the three prefects (who are always in the game regardless of player count) but acting individually on their turns. In the slightly less developed competitive mode, players take turns controlling Rome and the Spanish resistance, creating a dynamic tug-of-war that feels both thematic and mechanically sound. 

The resistance isn’t just a passive obstacle — it’s an active force, capable of pressing aggressively into territory, disrupting your lines by appearing behind you and triggering uprisings that build into existential threats. To me, it’s clear that Hispania was designed first and foremost as a solo or cooperative game, and the competitive mode comes with perhaps a bit too much asymmetry and some rules that make it fiddlier than the base game. 

Visually, Hispania is clean and functional. The map is detailed but readable, with clear iconography and region markers. The components — mostly wooden disks and meeples — are sturdy and well-organised, whilst those coins are absolutely out of this world. The rulebook is thorough, with clear examples and historical context that enrich the experience, and the translation, whilst occasionally verbose, is excellent. Hispania is a game that respects its subject matter without overwhelming players with simulationist detail.

Hispania is a smart, historically rich strategy game that offers depth without bloat. Its modular difficulty, flexible player modes, and thematic grounding make it a standout in the Roman conquest genre. Whether you’re coordinating legions with fellow consuls or facing off against a cunning resistance, Hispania offers a campaign worth waging — and one that rewards both strategic foresight and historical curiosity.

Hispania is available now from Zatu Games.