This is a bit long, so if you don't want to read it all feel free to skip to the summary at the end.

Anyway, I think Age of Exploration is, overall, the game I like best of the three. Although I do wish I hadn't lost my copy of Conquistador, I always kind of had a love-hate relationship with that game... the ratio of bookkeeping time to actual time pushing counters was just too high. New World, unfortunately, went the opposite direction. No bookkeeping, but the game was just too easy.

One of the great things about Conquistador was that it took a long time for colonization to become profitable, and you had to be rather careful with your cash for a while. Not so in New World... you'd be hard pressed to run out of cash in New World! Unfortunately, that makes New World essentially one of pure luck and little strategy. I doubt it will see the light of day for some time. Age of Exploration, though, manages to be about as simple as New World AND lots of fun. The name is quite accurate... there's no colonization involved here except for the VERY abstract appearances of bases in places like Hispaniola as the game progresses. My biggest complaint about Age of Exploration is that the rules are not terribly well written in some respects... the Let's Play pages with examples are nice, but unfortunately they have taken the place of real rules to some extent.

Some concepts are referred to at times but never well defined, with the result that I haven't a clue whether you're supposed to use the Land or Sea Navigation rating for a *river* expedition (my guess is Sea, because Sea/Coast/River uses one set of cards). My other complaint is about the cards; as always, the cards are of poor quality and the comers (and occasionally edges) are starting to fragment somewhat after about three playings. I strongly recommend laminating the cards (as had been done with the demo set at a convention I attended recently). I really like the way the game works, though.

The game is card-driven; if you're outfitting an expedition, you draw Outfitting cards, and once you've headed out into the unknown you draw a Sea/Coast/River card, a Land card, or a Civilization card (for contact with the Inca and Aztec Empires) every turn. Each leader has a numeric rating for attributes such as Leadership, Navigation (two kinds), Ship Handling, Personal Arms, and Negotiation. Certain cards (and certain spaces on the board) call for certain checks, where you want to roll 2d6 less than or equal to the modified numeric rating. Shiphandling is a little different, where you take a base of 6 or 8 depending on ship type and then add the Shiphandling modifier along with any others, but the concept is the same.

The goal of the game is to accumulate a number of victory points. In the short "Exploration" game, you need only a handful of points; one trip to the New World may well do it, especially if you've got 4-6 players. In the Campaign game, you need to make that first trip to get some points (at least one... Major Expeditions are only worth 4 points if you don't already have any points), then embark on Major Expeditions; these Major Expeditions vary in difficulty from the easiest (Descent of the Mississippi River, at 5 points) to moderately difficult ones (conquest of the Aztecs and Incas are worth 9 and 11, respectively) to the hardest (Traversing the Northwest Passage to the Pacific, 14 points... and only 15 are needed to win).

Traversing the Northwest Passage has been made easier than historical in the game, but it's stin damn difficult. I'd quibble a little with the point value of 5 for partial traversal of the Northwest Passage (I think it's too low for the difficulty, but I suppose it's not THAT hard if you've got Columbus, a Fervent Missionary to boost his leadership, and Sturdy Ships).

For reference, I think the only Major Expeditions I haven't mentioned are descent of the Amazon and circumnavigation of the globe. There are some things that bug me about the way this works. For one of the big sea expeditions, which means Northwest Passage or Circumnavigation, you almost HAVE to have one of the best explorers to have any hope of pulling it off, fortunately, the exact requirements seem to be a little different (Navigation seems slightly more important for NWP while Shiphandling seems slightly more important for crossing the Straits of Magellan).

This area of the game works much better than Conquistador, where circumnavigating the globe basically meant you needed an explorer (any would do) and enough ships that you had a decent chance of surviving the attrition rolls.

The components have their good and bad points; the caeds are flimsy (though not, apparently, in the same way that the FFF cards were flimsy; the corners and edges fragment instead of a permanent crease appearing in the middle), but the game mats are laid out extremely well and have a wealth of information contained on them (in fact, darn near all you need for most aspects of the game). I also like the look of the board; it manages to convey all the essential information quite wen and look good at the same time (it's not B&W like the FFF board). I'm a little annoyed that there aren't enough of some types of counters (really, they should have predicted that there would be times when everybody wants a Missionary!), but since the backs of the counters aren't used it's not a problem to write it in on the back of a less commonly-used counter.

In summary, I'd say that Age of Exploration is the only game of the three that really focuses on exploration. Conquistador and New World are, IMHO, focused more on colonization but try to give some time to the exploration part as well. IMHO, Age of Exploration also does a better job as a game because it is more focused. It's more of a beer-and-pretzels game than Conquistador is, but there's still a decent amount of strategy involved. I'd rate it about a 7 on a scale of 0 to 10. On that same scale, New World gets about a 2, while Conquistador gets anywhere from a 4 to an 8 depending on what kind of mood I'm in, so probably give it a 6.