Let's Talk about Conan

My initial impressions of Conan were very favorable. Last night, however, was the first time I had 3 of my regular board game group take a crack at it. Here's what happened...
We started with scenario 1, 3 heroes. The rulebook lists suggestions for what heroes and equipment to bring, but here's where the problems start. They only ever recommend these same heroes, for any mission pretty much, and always with the same starting equipment. If you want to take one of the other 21 heroes, you are left clueless as to how to equip your character. We equipped the characters as best we could guess and started in. This session was pretty fantastic, really. The way the hero players cooperated and varied their turn orders was cool, and I had to fight for every inch as the Overlord. In the end they barely won. I did manage to kill one hero.

That's when the wheels fell off...

We set up another scenario on a different board. For this one the hero players got a little more creative with their hero choices and didn't take someone who is good at opening locks. This is a fatal mistake. But here's the real problem with the scenario we chose. Conan starts out locked in a cell. The other players have to rescue him, which they couldn't do, so the player who was Conan literally did nothing for 4 whole rounds until we said fuck it and quit the scenario. Whoever thought this was a good scenario idea was seriously wrong.

We set up a THIRD scenario that used the same board as before. In this one, we made sure that no one started out in prison or anything stupid like that. The players chose their heroes, and I gave them pretty free reign on equipment. This proved to be a real mistake. Again, the rules give you no guidance if you don't choose their suggested setups, which are identical almost all of the time. One player took a character who has leadership, but there's no mention of him having any minions to lead. We didn't know if he was supposed to be able to control other player characters or what. There seems to be a distinction between a "hero" and an "ally", but who knows.

One player gave himself the most powerful weapon in the deck, and he proceeded to defeat the enemy they had to kill within the second turn. It was pretty lame. At that point we quit. Now I'm dreading having to put all that stuff away.

My bottom line at this point is:
1. When it works, it's really great. The way the Overlord player is balanced against the heroes is pretty fantastic.
2. The rules are horrid and the scenarios are extremely hit or miss. So far it seems mostly miss.
3. I think this game needs a point system or something like that to equip your characters, or a static list of starting equipment for all of the 25 characters.
4. This game was a year late. There's no excuse for all of the oversights.

This has been discussed quite a bit in the KS comments. Basically, the scenarios are *not* set up with intentionally chosen configurations of heroes and equipment. There was no apparent attempt to make elements swappable. I'm not at all saying that you're wrong to expect that that would be possible, but my understanding is that the scenarios were designed and tested for only certain spreads, so expecting that you can change things around and run it differently is expecting something that will at best be hit-or-miss.

I'm skeptical that they could retrofit a point-buy system onto this at this point. I mean, maybe, but how do you judge the point value of lockpicking skill in one scenario when it's vertically required and in another where it's next to useless? For better or worse--quite possibly worse--everything seems pretty much to have been designed as its own unique element.

The salvation here would be in having *lots* of scenarios. That may still happen, but Monolith has been, obviously, slow off the blocks with tools. I've also gotten the impression from the comments that they were slow to provide scenario-development support for English-language designers, but that could just be hearsay. (Well, it *is* hearsay.)

While it seems like there's a plethora of heroes, the stretch goal ones aren't, I don't think, incorporated into any of the current designs, and Monolith hasn't released any scenarios for the add-ons. I think they thought, at some level, that they were being nice by giving us the stretch goals as a part of wave 1 instead of wave 2, but I think it'll turn out that that was a mistake because they weren't ready to back them up with content (well, that and the mistakes with the SG components), and so people who Kickstarted are largely sitting around with materials that look like they're ready for use but aren't really easily usable in the current game. (I think Monolith's other motivations were manufacturing and shipping related, that it was easier for them to ship out the SGs now to everyone with the base game rather than send a second full shipment to everyone along with a relatively few wave 2 expansions.)

You are likely dead-on with those thoughts. I also forgot to mention the treasure chest situation... you have a deck of a LOT of possible loot. But the scenarios all have you putting the same 5 or 6 boring cards in the chests. I think this seriously needs some fan-created solutions. We will likely come up with starting gear for all heroes and then some sort of random loot situation.

wait...an overreaching ks game shipped with half-cooked expansion rules?

I'm shocked!

seriously though, one thing I never really grokked about these ks campaigns that go big...if the base game hasn't been truly edited and tested...how can all these created-on-the-fly-to-feed-backers expansion bits that are dumped in fare well?

I'd like to see a ks campaign do something different as the pledge amount grew. instead of including a bunch of worthless fat...make the game cheaper and cheaper for backers as more pledgers and money roll in.

I think it's a good example why I'm always wondering about KS with extra heroes, extra monsters, extra etc.

I played the first scenario of this and the one where it's just Conan going into an inn and trying to force a priest to lift a curse, had a great time. We just used the suggested heroes/equipment and everything went very well.

It's a simple system deepend by resource management (the gems) and the skill system. What it has going for it is what seems like interesting scenarios. Tearing through an inn trying to interrogate priests felt very different than storming a Pict village to decapitate a Shaman and rescue a princess.

I know there's been a fairly strong push for a rules rewrite, and there are definitely issues with scenarios (and player aid cards, which are the only source for some information), but I found the rules, at least on a readthrough, not really all that bad at all. I didn't come at it quite "cold," as I had absentmindedly watched some videos, but things seemed pretty straightforward--or at least, the things that a rules rewrite could fix don't really seem like the sources of the problem. You'd expect the levels of rules questions on BGG to be moderately low for a new game like this, but there do seem to be a fair number of them that are addressed black-letter in the rulebooks. Granted, there's an outright contradiction between text and example regarding inherent movement allowance, but that's been cleared up by the designer in favor of the example. I get that the devil's in the details, or the application, and the muck-up of icons on the stretch goal tile is pretty sloppy, but the level of carping seems a little out of proportion.

jpat wrote: I know there's been a fairly strong push for a rules rewrite, and there are definitely issues with scenarios (and player aid cards, which are the only source for some information), but I found the rules, at least on a readthrough, not really all that bad at all. I didn't come at it quite "cold," as I had absentmindedly watched some videos, but things seemed pretty straightforward--or at least, the things that a rules rewrite could fix don't really seem like the sources of the problem. You'd expect the levels of rules questions on BGG to be moderately low for a new game like this, but there do seem to be a fair number of them that are addressed black-letter in the rulebooks. Granted, there's an outright contradiction between text and example regarding inherent movement allowance, but that's been cleared up by the designer in favor of the example. I get that the devil's in the details, or the application, and the muck-up of icons on the stretch goal tile is pretty sloppy, but the level of carping seems a little out of proportion.

I agree, this isn't at all as bad as Myth was.

Tom and Sam just did a Miami Dice review on Conan. They called it one of the best games of the year and the best overlord system ever created.

Quintin Smith also talked a bit about Conan on his last podcast and he sounded like he really enjoyed it.

It sounds like a light skirmish game with top quality components. Monolith stated that all the kickstarter extras will be used in future scenarios but those won't come till some time next year.

I got my kickstarter copy last week but haven't had a chance to play it yet.

The dice tower review was pretty glowing. It's also funny, because he got a few rules wrong.

Video review from Shut Up & Sit Down came out this morning.

The more I play this game the more I like it. Elegant and fun with much testosterone.

It feels like waiting for the second edition my alleviate some of my admittedly genetic rules anxiety.

The game landed in La belle province on Friday (apparently everybody province-wide got it on the same day - quite a feat!).

There's a ton of stuff, some of it is bilingual so there's excess cardboard, none of the SG or add-ons are supported by the scenarios provided. At least the King Pledge stuff is featured in some scenarios.

The rules are simple, no doubt about it. But the rulebooks are really badly set up. The contents are not clearly defined, more of an afterthought (you get 25 of these gems by the way!). Game phase is shown at the end of the players' rules instead of the beginning, stuff like that. A long and confusing paragraph on movement is directly contradicted by the following example. Some spell cards are missing text - I thought they would have been for creating our own but apparently not. So this is what they came up with after revisions and the feedback from everybody? Pretty poor. Of course I'll be asking for a new free rulebook when one will be available.

One thing I find lacking is a bit of background stuff - just a paragraph or something presenting each character, it would have helped. The back of each add-on box (huge for little content - those minis are well-protected indeed) has a Howard quote so there's that.

I'll probably be ditching the mini support trays as they take so much room in the box. Maybe everything'll fit inside a single box then? Despite the packaging designed to prevent content movement during shipping, some minis are still bent, but that seems systemic as the recent update on the expansion boxes shows the very same problem of figures with bent swords.

We'll be playing it tonight, I expect some heads are gonna roll.

Edit: One more thing - I expect the box cover to be the same for retail as for KS (either kind of pledge). Those undead featured on the art were only included in the King Pledge and some more as SG.

I didn't have much problem with the rulebooks, as I've said, but they are essentially written backwards from the point of view of modern gamers. I've glanced at the PDF of the new French heroes' book, and they've followed a much more conventional approach, starting with the components, then going to turn structure, then going to actions. Like I said, it was pretty much the reverse in the original: actions, then turn structure, then (to a limited extent) components. I think people will probably cotton to the new way better.