Pax Hispanica Game Review

I gotta say: I love it when a rulebook uses terms like “midlife crisis”, “murder”, “tax revolt”, “mutiny”, “apostasy”, and “voodoo”...and that was all before I found out I needed to rise from the ranks of teenage piracy during the Anglo-Spanish War all the way through the 30 Years’ War!

Pax Hispanica (2025, Ion Game Design) has a lot going for it. That starts with being a game that creates some drama thanks to a rich backstory. I’m not a theme-first gamer, so usually, I read the flavor text in a manual’s introduction before getting back to the task of shuffling resources around a board or drawing a bunch of cards that don’t mean anything or gathering my income and launching into a new round of taking actions. Story, schmory.

But Pax Hispanica—somehow this is my third foray into Pax games in the last two months!!!—forces a player to accept a few difficult facts. The first is that slave labor in the 17th century was a real thing. No getting around it. That means rounds of Pax Hispanica—each lasting four years—start with a rough truth: your faction, be it the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, or Courish forces under your control, need to ensure that vacant colonies on the map…

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