Conquest Strategy: How to Take Over the World

World domination games look like they're about dice. They're actually about economics: every turn, the map pays out armies, and the player who engineers the best income while keeping the fewest borders almost always wins. Here's the theory, from the habits that stop you being eliminated early to the tactics that beat our Hard bot.

Rule zero: income wins wars

You get one army for every three territories, plus a bonus for each complete continent. Those bonuses are the whole game. A small continent held for five turns pays more than a dozen dice-lucky conquests. Early on, pick the cheapest continent you can defend — the ones with few entrances and a small bonus are worth far more per border than the big prizes — and build your whole opening around taking and holding it.

Beginner habits that instantly raise your win rate

• •Count borders, not territories. A continent with one entrance needs one strong stack; a sprawl of twelve territories with six borders is a liability, not an empire.
• •Attack with the odds: three dice against one or two defenders slightly favors you, but grinding a big stack into a bigger one is how leads evaporate. A comfortable rule: invade when you outnumber the defender by at least 3 to 2.
• •Always conquer at least one territory per turn if it's cheap — that earns a card, and card sets become huge army injections later.
• •Never leave 1-army territories on your frontier. Ones invite invasion; a wall of 3s makes neighbors look elsewhere.
• •In the fortify step, move rear armies toward the fight. Armies parked in your interior are armies you don't have.

Continent economics, by the numbers

Judge every continent by bonus-per-border. The southern continents with two or three entrances and a +2 bonus are the classic openings: cheap to take, cheap to hold, and they compound quietly while bigger players brawl. The largest continent on the map is a trap for anyone who grabs it early — its bonus looks irresistible, but it leaks from so many directions that holding it costs more than it pays until the late game. If a rival does complete a continent, breaking just one of its territories deletes their entire bonus — often the highest-value attack on the board, even if you lose the territory right back.

Cards: the hidden clock

With rising trade-in values, card sets escalate from 4 armies to 15 and beyond — the game has a built-in doomsday clock. (Fixed values are the default; switch to Rising in the game options, and pick how steeply it climbs.) Two consequences: first, always take your free territory each turn so you keep drawing; second, watch your rivals' card counts. A player sitting on four cards is one conquest away from a monster trade-in, and eliminating a weakened player hands you their whole hand — the single swingiest move in the game. Sometimes a long march across the map to finish off a dying player pays for itself twice over.

The middlegame: be strong, look harmless

• •Don't win the early game too loudly — the player who looks strongest becomes everyone's target.
• •Let rivals grind each other down; attack the winner of their war, not the loser.
• •Expand toward dead ends and coastlines, not into open plains where three players can hit you.
• •Before ending your attack phase, ask: did this turn improve my income or shorten my borders? If neither, you attacked for nothing.

Beating the bots

• •Easy attacks on impulse and scatters its reinforcements — hold a continent and it will bleed itself dry against your walls.
• •Normal defends its continents and picks fair fights. Beat it on economics: take a cheaper continent, break its bonus once per turn, and out-earn it.
• •Hard plays the long game — it masses armies, times card trades, and will cross the map to break your continent. Deny it easy conquests (no stray 1s), keep a reserve stack near your best entrance, and strike the turn after it spends its armies on someone else.
• •Expert plays the game this guide teaches: it holds its card sets while everyone else burns the cheap trades, refuses fights that don't pay, farms exactly one conquest a turn, and saves its armies for continent sweeps and eliminations. Beat it by denying the cheap card conquest and forcing it to spend before its big trade lands.
• •Brutal plans whole turns, and every Brutal seat is dealt a personality at random: a hunter, a continent builder, a land-grabbing raider, a turtle that grows one doom stack and saves its cards for a knockout, or a card counter. All of them cheat a little: they see every hand at the table, so they know exactly what set you can cash next turn and wall up against it, and they price every head by the cards they would capture (fixed or escalating), so a thin player sitting on four cards gets hunted. They spend armies like they are scarce: one cheap conquest for the card, then they stack, merge their stacks, and strike only when the whole campaign is a sure thing. At a crowded table they refuse to bleed each other against your wall; in a duel they grind, because a 3v2 roll wins the army trade. There is no trick that beats it consistently: out-earn it with a continent it cannot break cheaply, never sit on a fat hand while you are thin on land, and expect to lose some games.

Practice the openings

Play a few games on the Compact map against Normal bots focusing only on continent economics — take the cheapest continent and just hold it. Then move up to the Classic map and practice the middlegame: quiet expansion, card discipline, and one well-timed elimination. Once those are habits, Hard — and your friends — stop being a problem. You can play solo against the bots, pass one device around, or send friends an invite link and settle it online.