Conquest was the first game I bought for my Mac PowerBook 1400 back in '97. It's engaging at first -- you start out having reached the shore of an unknown continent and with your two small ships you found your first settlement and start expanding into the blackness of unexplored terrain. It's fun racing your rivals to be the first to discover and name the highest mountain and longest river. However, the level of suspense is pretty low in this game. The other colonial powers are never consistently aggressive enough to threaten the survival of your colonial empire, and the combat model is such that it's almost impossible to eliminate your opponents. The game ends when an arbitrary number of turns expire and the winner is determined by an almost equally arbitrary points system. I generally found myself losing interest later in the game and getting bogged down in micromanaging my cities. Compared to the other 4x turn-based strategy games available for Mac at the time (Imperialism, Master of Orion 2, Civilization 2), Conquest of the New World comes in a distant fourth. I find those other games more satisfying because the threat of annihilation by your rivals is very real if you fall too far behind. Those games also end more conclusively with either a last man standing or with one player accomplishing some feat so great that the others have no choice but to acknowlege his/her supremacy.
