Conquest of The New World Deluxe Edition: Interplay's Underrated Colonial Strategy Game

Year: 1995 · Developer/Publisher: Interplay · Designer: Vince DeNardo · Platform: DOS · Theme: Historical, Design Tool, Multiplayer

Sid Meier’s Colonization gets cited constantly as the definitive colonial-strategy game of the era, which has left Interplay’s Conquest of The New World sitting in its shadow for three decades despite covering the same historical ground with its own distinct approach. Players choose a nationality, French, Dutch, English, Spanish, or Portuguese, or opt to play as Natives instead, and start with a small group of explorers pushing back the black veil covering an unexplored continent. The pitch is simple. What the game does with it is not.

Exploration carries more weight here than in most contemporaries. The rendered landscapes, mountains, rivers, valleys, plains, were considered some of the best of their kind at the time, complete with a zoom feature that lets a player drop down into the terrain in surprising detail. A small but memorable touch lets explorers name any new geographical feature they discover and earn points for the credit, turning the early exploration phase into something closer to genuine cartography than a fog-of-war checklist. Discovered resources, gold, metal, and in this Deluxe edition, new additions like gems, jade, and medicinal herbs, shape where a smart player chooses to settle.

Settlements themselves are where the game asks for real attention. Farms, mills, smiths, churches, and houses all have to be built and staffed, and a player can zoom directly into a colony to watch it operate, moving individual workers between jobs and adjusting productivity by hand. It’s a level of granular control that a lot of strategy games from this period skip past in favor of abstracted population numbers, and it’s part of why the game earned a loyal, if quiet, following among players who found it after the fact.

Combat, when it eventually comes, resolves on a small grid in short turn-based exchanges that play more like a miniature wargame than a real-time skirmish. Infantry, cavalry, and artillery attach to leaders and move across the grid, and the system is simple enough to learn in one fight without feeling shallow across a full campaign. It’s a deliberate contrast to the slower economic build-up phase, and it works.

That slower phase is also the game’s clearest weakness. There’s a real mid-game sag once the initial exploration burns off and a player is left juggling two colonies without enough income to expand either one quickly. The Deluxe Edition’s new trade-alliance system, letting separate colonies exchange goods on the map, eases this somewhat, and the expanded diplomacy and nationality bonuses give returning players something to actually chase. None of it fully solves the pacing problem, though; a long stretch of “just building up” still separates the promising opening from the point where a campaign starts moving toward an actual conquest.

The nationality bonuses are a genuinely well-considered addition rather than a cosmetic reskin. Playing France grants improved relations with Native factions, easing early trade and reducing the odds of an unnecessary early conflict, while Holland leans into its historical trading reputation with extra income from gold. Choosing a nationality in the Deluxe Edition isn’t just a matter of picking a flag and a starting location; it meaningfully shifts which strategies actually work, in a way that rewards players who understand the different colonial powers’ real historical strengths.

It’s worth being honest, too, about how the Deluxe Edition frames itself against the earlier original release rather than pretending the upgrade is more transformative than it actually was. Reviewers at the time were fairly direct that existing owners of the base game weren’t missing much by skipping this version, since the core loop, systems, and general balance carry over largely unchanged. The value case for the Deluxe Edition was always aimed at players discovering the game for the first time, not at getting owners of the original to double-dip on the same core experience with a handful of new features layered on top.

How to run it today

Conquest of The New World Deluxe Edition runs in DOSBox on any current machine. This is the full CD-ROM release, minus its original CD audio track, so the game data mounts and runs as a standard DOS install with no extra configuration needed.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Mouse-driven menus and map navigation · Setup difficulty: Low

Legal status

Interplay has continued to exist in a much-diminished form since the 1990s, unlike a lot of studios from the same era that folded outright, but there’s no confirmed official modern re-release of Conquest of The New World, and nothing on record indicates active enforcement against copies of this specific title circulating today. That leaves it in the same unclear middle ground as most of Interplay’s back catalog: a nominally still-operating rights holder, and no public signal one way or the other about what they intend to do with this particular game.

If you liked this, try

Sid Meier’s Colonization, the genre’s best-known point of comparison and the game most reviewers reached for when describing this one. High Seas Trader, for a related take on the same historical period built around maritime trade instead of settlement. And Gold of The Americas, another colonial-era strategy title covering adjacent ground.