Conan the Barbarian and Age of Conan the Strategy Board Game

Well it was a long long time coming but this weekend we finally had the long awaited Conan and Conan extravaganza.  At around 4 P.M. on Saturday, our bellies still full from Giving Thanks and eating Turkey two days before,  we gathered at Metroburb Gamer Headquarters for an extended session.

Part 1: Conan the Barbarian on the big screen in the basement.

Part 2: Dinner

Part 3: Age of Conan the Strategy Board Game

The Movie: Conan the Barbarian

What can really be said about watching Conan the Barbarian?  I had actually never seen the whole movie before and the parts I had seen had been sanitized for television.  I really liked it.  It was cheesy at times but it seemed to be done that way quite on purpose and I appreciated it.  It had lots of violence, sex, and even some good comedy.  I think it was a hit and I'll be watching it again.

A quick recap of my favorite parts: 

1) The classic "What is best in life?" scene
2) The throwing of the witch into the fire - I could not stop laughing
3) The punching of the camel
4) The biting of the vulture
5) Anything with conan's theif buddy in it - that dude is hilarious
6) Anything with the crazy narrator guy in it - that dude is even more hilarious

Oh and what was with Lemmy from Motorhead and the guy from Spinal Tap being the primary bad guy henchmen?  I kept expecting them to start singing "The Ace of Spades" or "Big Bottom".

Good times... At this point I had underestimated the length of the movie quite a bit and it was almost 6:30.  We needed some grub so we went to a local pub and enjoyed some food and beers.  Then we returned to the house and realized no one had brought any Pims Cookies.  This was a serious oversight so Richard volunteered to go remedy the situation.  We setup the game and brewed a pot of coffee while he went to the store.

Finally we began the game by toasting Crom with shots of cold Jager Meister.  This was admittedly a poor fit but I couldn't figure out what beverage would be appropriate for a Conan-themed night and it was the best I could do. 


The Game: Age of Conan the Strategy Board Game

As we sat down to begin the game finally it was on the verge of 8:15 PM.  I was a bit worried about this because we have some early risers in the group but it was Saturday of a long weekend so I was sure we could make it through. 

We had each read the rules at least once.  Jake and I had both had 3 readings under our belts and I read parts of the FAQ out loud so we could interpret and incorporate some of those into our understanding of the game as well.

I'm not recalling the names of the civilizations in the game but I was Geen, Jake was Red, Richard was Yellow, and Alex was Purple.  Alex and I were the two civilzations that start with one less unit on the board but have 2 starting sorcery tokens.

I won't go into depth with the rules because there are too many but the gist of the game is this:  it is an area control game with a military and intrigue.  Each player has cards of their own and there is also a generic card deck that can help with military and intrigue contests.  Military contests give you points and intrigue contests give you gold.  There are also objectives that you can win to get extra points.

The role of Conan in the game is as a game timer and either an aid or detriment to player's military and intrigue encounters.  Conan wanders the board having adventures and affecting combat and intrigue in the area he is in.  Conan has 4 adventures per age and the game consists of 3 ages.  Each adventure is several turns. 

At the beginning of each of Conan's adventures the players bid for control of Conan.  Controlling Conan allows you to move Conan and collect adventure tokens.  It also gives you an advantage in your military and intrigue contest die rolls in terms of hits and if Conan is in the province you are fighting in you gain an additional die.

The turn mechanism is in this game is very cool.  You roll 7 fate dice and the faces of those dice are the actions that can be taken by the players.  The possible outcomes are Military, Intrigue, Military/Intrigue, Court + Conan, and Wild.  Military allows you to move or add troops and attack, Intrigue allows you to move or add emissaries and form alliances, Military/Intrigue gives you a choice of these, Court + Conan lets you take a Conan adventure token and place raider tokens and draw cards, and Wild lets you choose any action.  The only rule is that you must use the die that is most specific to your action choice.  So you cannot use a wild for military when a military die is available.

The other neat thing in the game is the individual kingdom card decks for each race.  These give you special actions, possibly throughout the game, events and other advantages.  There is also a generic strategy card deck that gives you advantages during military and intrigue competitions.

The military conquest part of the game is also interesting since each area consists of one or more terrain types called a campaign track.  When you invade a province you must win a battle on each of these terrains before you subjugate the territory and win points for it.

There are many many other rules but I can't cover them all.  So let's talk about the play experience.  For one thing I think that the rules to this game are not well organized.  At its heart it is not an especially difficult game but we had trouble making sure we were following all of the rules for each type of action.  I think the rulebook needs a rewrite to simplify reference and access to the subtler parts of the different actions. 

As for the game itself it was very long but I was never bored so I guess that is a positive.  Once we got the hang of the different actions we went through the use of the dice very quickly.  I have to say that I found the bidding for control of Conan way too frequent and annoying.  It is central to the game experience but we rolled a lot of Court + Conan dice as actions and that makes Conan's adventures complete faster.  When this happens I found that it disrupted my enjoyment of the main part of the game - moving and fighting with a bid that I did not find at all interesting.  The only time I really cared about Conan was on the final round when I wanted to control Conan so I could attempt to crown him king.

I also found the book keeping during the Age Change phase to be a bit much but this only happens twice in each game so that part is forgivable.

So the meat of the game is moving armies and emissaries and fighting.  I found both of these parts really fun.  The dice were often uncooperative but that's exciting to me and I only had bad luck against the odds more than once right at the end of the game.  Richard had a rougher time with the dice and was frustrated for part of the game because of it.  I can see the problem here but I still like the dice and think it's worth it for the experience. 

The game ended early because in the third age I crowned Conan as king successfully.  I had won the Cobra Crown by having the most Treasure tokens at the end of the second age and was fairly certain I had the lead in that type of token.  I also won control of Conan and he was fairly close to my kingdom.  To crown Conan you need to have him in your Kingdom at the end of an adventure and have the most of a certain type of adventure token.  I think this is pretty uncommon and probably easy for other players to prevent once you have some experience with the game but in this case it all worked out for me almost by accident.  It's a good thing too because we still had two full adventures left and we were pushing 4 hours of play time by this point.  If we had gone on the game would have been at least another 30 minutes and we were all getting tired.

In the end crowning Conan was the difference and allowed me to win the game.  We were very close in Empire points to that point and other players definitely had leads in the other two types of adventure tokens.  Having Conan crowned as king gives you 3 points plus it prevents other players from reaping bonuses for majorities in adventure tokens so that gave me an 8 point swing.  It still ended up being close however and had I not crowned Conan it would have been extremely close.  I think this is a well balanced game.

I'm a bit torn on this game because I really did enjoy myself but there are some obvious drawbacks.  The first is the game length.  I think we could definitely reduce the play time with more experience but not much below 3 hours I'm betting.  That makes this game approximately double the length of games we normally play.  The other problem is that this game really wants to be played with no more or less than 4 players.  I know that there are rules to play it in other configurations but I think the experience has to suffer for that. 

I really like the idea of the kingdom cards and I'd love to play the game enough to get to know the differences in the strengths and weaknesses of the kingdoms more thoroughly.  This was most definitely a learning game and I would expect alot more player screwage in future games when the rules are settled a bit more and people can concentrate on impeding others in addition to simply trying to help themselves.  The other thing I noticed about the game was that I seemed to have a fairly easy time in the South of the board and Jake seemed to have free reign in the West while Richard and Alex seemed to be forced into conflict with each other fairly early in the North and East.  This slowed them down quite a bit while Jake and I had a chance to build up our Kingdoms.

The game is beautiful and fun and well thought out and gives you the fun of an old school american conflict game like Risk with euro mechanics and a lot more strategy.  I did not at all understand the relationship between intrigue and military, gold and points, and the interplay with Conan at first blush which means the game needs more plays.  I'm hoping this means that the game has great depth and replayability.  Maybe it means that the game is simply chaotic and difficult to understand but I have faith that it does not.

I'm hoping to get this one back to the table before too long so we don't forget the rules and can try to see how short we can get the play time.

I'm giving it an 8 right now because of what I think it can be.  In other words I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt and chalking the drawbacks up to my inexperience.  I can see this dropping to as low as 6 or going up to 9 with repeated plays.

In any case it was a fun day and I would love to do more movie/game/food tie ins and weekend sessions versus just trying to squeeze in our once a week session for just a couple of hours.

When we next meet we will be continuing our exploration of Shogun.  The slightly interrupted Game of the Month.  I'm looking forward to lowering the play time of that one as well.