Conan Review

Conan the Barbarian is a character that has featured in books, comics, films, role-playing games and tabletop games. ‘Conan’ is the most highly acclaimed board game experience using this intellectual property.

In Conan, one player plays as the Overlord and controls hordes of savage tribesmen, no-good lowlifes and undead minions against one to four players who play together as Conan and his fellow adventurers. Each adventure brings new terrain and any number of different creatures that the Overlord has at their disposal, from giant snakes, to wizards and wolves.

Conan Gameplay

The first thing you must do in a game of Conan is pick a scenario. Fortunately, there is a whole book full of them along with a wealth of fan-made ones available online. The scenario will tell you which map (all of which are single piece game boards) to use, which miniatures you need and usually recommend which heroes to take. Each scenario has different victory conditions for the hero, but the overlord can generally win by killing off all the hero characters.

Each hero has a set number of crystals which represent both their health and stamina. At the start of your turn you can choose either to have a hero be active (recovering a little stamina, but giving full choice of actions), or passive (recovering a lot of stamina, but vastly restricting their actions). An active hero can then spend crystals to do various actions, for example putting a crystal on movement allows you to move from one space of the board to another. Placing a crystal on melee attack allows you to hit someone with your weapon, each crystal you use adds an extra dice, so you may want to use multiple crystals against tough enemies.

In addition, any weapons you have may add additional dice or re-rolls to your attacks. To perform an attack, you roll the dice you earned from spending crystals/your weapon and up the number of hits rolled. You then subtract the opponent's defence; any difference is the amount of damage done. However, the opponent can spend crystals to roll dice to defend too! Better fighters and better weapons grant you dice of different colours with higher odds to hit.

The Overlord

The overlord works a little differently, each turn they will recover a set number of crystals. But instead of spending them like the heroes do they can activate whole units from the river. The leftmost unit in the river costs one crystal to activate, when they activate each mini in that unit can both move an attack, just like a hero, except less ability to bolster their attacks. After the unit is activated it is moved to the rightmost spot of the river. The river typically has eight locations so activating the same unit twice would cost one crystal the first time and eight the second, this system encourages rotating your unit activations, but also allows the heroes to slow the overlord down by wiping out a unit. The card still remains in the river but activating it does nothing but send it back to the right hand side!

There are many more rules to do with when you can move into or out of a space, when you can reach an opponent with a thrown axe, treasure to loot and doors to be smashed open. And for each of these there is a skill that units can have to bolster their ability, a slippery rogue may have no problem sneaking past a wall of guards, while Conan may instead have to run in an kill a few before he can get by.