New Conan board game?

[Doom]

Anyone else tried the Conan Kickstarter game? I have it, it plays well but...it's not quite as good as I hoped. I'm hoping someone's pushed on said the game gets better later.

[Nattsurf]

no i have not tried it yet but i will soon try it.

[Omega]

I had the playtest. Seems ok. But kind of convoluted too in a way. Like theres more complexity or jargon than it needs.

[finarvyn]

I got to play the game a few weeks ago at a local game store and I loved it. A lot like HeroQuest, but a bit more complex and Conan-themed.

The characters are barbarian (Conan), wizard, thief, pirate. We didn't use the pirate. There are 4 different boards -- castle, village, ship, something else -- we did a village scenario. Basically, players have an objective and they try to accomplish it. Mine was to (1) rescue a princess, and (2) bring the head of the evil wizard off the map. And I had only 8 turns to do this.*I failed to accomplish both objectives, having rescued the girl but not quite killing the wizard. (He had 1-2 hit points left at the end and I had no time to take the head off of the map even if I had killed him.) A lot of fun, but I had to run 3 characters which was tricky since I wasn't sure what I was doing yet.

Playing a character is interesting. You get these "gems" which are used for doing actions like picking a lock, moving extra spaces, making an attack better, casting a spell, re-rolling a die, or whatever. Problem is that you only "heal" a certain number of these per turn (you can be active or resting, which heals at a different rate) so those gems provide resource management. If you take damage those gems can be lost to you and that it like taking damage; you have fewer of them to play with later in the game.

This scenario had 8 items you could acquire in 8 locked chests, so if you cleared a hut from the village you could spend some gems to try to pick the lock and get the goodies therein. Random draw of some cards. I found chainmail, a healing potion, that kind of thing. The party works cooperatively but each character starts at a different location, so trading items is hard but possible if you move to the same spot. With only 8 turns to play with, however, not much time for this stuff.

The game master runs the monsters. They are all visible on the board at the start so no surprises. Monsters are placed on a special board in a specific sequence. The game master also has gems to spend to activate his monsters, but their cost is based on their placement on the special board. When the GM activates a monster for a turn he can move and attack, then that monster card is moved to the far end of the special board so that its cost becomes big. This makes the others cheaper as they slide over to the cheap side. Interesting strategy for the GM is that he can't always keep fighting with the best monsters or they would cost him a lot every turn, and his gems are limited as well, so he has to choose carefully what is cheap versus what is nearby or whatever.

Anyway, a lot of fun. The guy who ran the game bought it through a kickstart so he had more characters than you can find in the core game, but those expansions should be out soon. It would give more characters, more boards, more missions. I don't think that I mentioned before, but they suggest certain characters for particular scenarios (Conan is in every one of them) so that folks might not be so possessive of "their character" since that one might not be in the next storyline.

[Skywalker]

I have really enjoyed it. Set up is tedious but gameplay is really good mixing the best of Eurogame resource management with AmeriStyle components and gameplay. It really needed a base system for choosing heroes, equipment, and monsters, like Descent to use all the components, but that is clearly beyond what I expected.

It has a bunch of rough edges but the publisher is new at this and seems to be devoted to smoothing these off. The new rules and tweaked scenarios are a good step in the right direction and I expect the expansions and the campaign book will be an even bigger step.

It's going to be a good resource with the Conan RPG too.

[Skywalker]

Given the uncertainty as to what Add-Ons will make it to retail, the secondary market is going bananas. The Black Ones are more than 5 times their original cost at USD100, and the Dragon has also increased dramatically.