Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
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 of the Spanish Main (“New Spain” off the Caribbean, along with the Gulf of Mexico) have enough labor to continue operations.
There was an uncomfortable moment during my first multiplayer game of Pax Hispanica when I had to remind players that, based on their faction’s positioning and progress on a Profession Track that acquiring labor might mean that there would be a need to kidnap indigenous people from a nearby “visita”, or holy site.
No, this is not your grandmother’s pirating game. I’m OK with games grounded in history because it forces harder conversations, and Pax Hispanica slaps you across the face with those harder conversations. And that’s before you do standard Pax game things, such as auctioning cards, shuffling cash around a closed economy, and pursuing instant-win conditions tied to extremism within one of four career tracks.
“This is a journey,” I said to no one in particular during that first game. Although I did try the full, long game as a solo adventure, I highly recommend Pax Hispanica for its short-form format: starting the game in 1614 for the optional “comet” short game, that ends in Prague in 1637 at the end of a period where pirates took on slaves from Africa to boost their operations.
That way, you get a taste of what Pax Hispanica is going for, without spending 4-5 hours at the table. You get to buzz around the small board with a fleet of up to three galleons as you scoop up treasure and try your best to navigate the seas without getting tripped up (i.e., murdered) by your opponents, all of whom are waiting to play Haven cards that match regions of the sea areas on the main map. (In a touch of dramatic bravado, designer Phil Eklund asks players to shout “Strike your colors!” each time someone tries to enter one of your sea zones. Interdiction is a thing in Pax Hispanica!)
With that shorter game, something else happened for me: I found myself surprised the rules load for an Eklund game was only high, not ridiculous. The game becomes strangely approachable—again, assuming you can embrace some of the darker historical elements of the period—thanks to a rulebook that is a little less dense than normal, and an excellent player aid known as the Rosetta Stone that all players use to understand the game’s iconography as well as how a fleet’s “legality” affects how it initiates battles or loads/redeems treasure.
Pax Hispanica works as a 2-3 hour pirate adventure game that has easy-to-track win conditions. But I think it works best at higher player counts, because playing this solo was a bit of a drag. Also, some game elements present in multiplayer are not present in solo, such as the interdiction elements of sea combat that comprise some of the more exciting elements of multiplayer. The Spanish faction begins the game with a major advantage, so having one player taking on the role of the Spanish gives everyone else something—and, someone—to aim for. That also means when the Spanish are not taken on by a human player, some of the more interesting bits are not a part of the game.
Ion sent the Deluxe Edition of Pax Hispanica for review, and as a deluxe production, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, particularly in a world where some deluxe productions are truly out of this world. Some people enjoy a cloth board; from a look-and-feel perspective, I thought the addition of this board was nice. But from a functional perspective, the cloth board falls flat (or not, in this case). I began setting up the game on that cloth board only once, and when the indigenous tokens fell down because they could not be cleanly stood up on the table, I pivoted to the regular board and used that for all my plays. I’m thankful the cardboard board was included, because I don’t know what I would have done if I only had the cloth option!
Metal coins? Check. Cute cathedral tokens that fit into wooden visita tokens? Great. But some of the other elements, such as a paper-thin Progression board and a single Rosetta Stone, were strange choices. I’m curious to see what the standard edition looks like, because I’m not sure either version quite fits its own description.
Pax Hispanica is one of the best Pax games for creating drama, story, and other theatrical elements in board game form. I’m not getting out costumes to play it in the future, but the table talk it created was solid. And many of the game elements work well, especially as a fan of how Pax games deliver an experience. If you can play this with a dedicated group and max out the player count, Pax Hispanica is worth a look.
