SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
there's a lot of nudity and nipples French games company Monolith made a big splash with their Conan kickstarter, bringing on board some top artists and designers to do the 'definitive' barbarian skirmish adventure game. The KS provided tons of extra miniatures but I missed all that, but the base game is pretty nice anyway.
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The game's aesthetic (particularly its problematic treatment of gender) is discussed in one of our blogs.
Players get to be Conan (killing machine), Shevatus (thief-type with throwing daggers), Hadrathus (mage) and Belit (pirate queen, usually with a team of expendable redshirts in tow). The miniatures are gorgeous and so are the boards.
Scenarios pit you all against an adversary player, the Overlord, who controls all the monsters, Picts and other mooks on the board via a lovely dashboard called the Book of Skelos. There are a bunch of scenarios that have you rescuing the kidnapped girl before the Picts sacrifice her to their snake-god, fighting off mercenaries trying to board your ship, being trapped in a ruined temple by a necromancer and his demons, etc.
Players expend energy crystals to power moves, attacks, spells or other abilities and they can also grant you re-rolls. Each turn you get back either a few (if aggressive) or a lot (if cautious - but cautious characters an only move slowly and defend). Crystals are also your life and get removed when you are wounded and you die when you can't remove any more.
The Overlord has a more interesting job. He also spends and recovers crystals, but also manages his roster of minions in a spread of cards called 'the River': character cards at the left are cheap to activate but, once activated, they move to the far right end and the other characters all shuffle leftwards. This means you need to plan ahead to activate your more expensive characters.
Conan is fast, breezy fun. The mechanic is very elegant and adapts itself to a lot of different situations (jumping between boats, climbing walls, opening chests) as well as simply thumping each other. It's not very symmetrical: Conan is simply tougher than the other heroes (it is his game after all) and the Overlord will need several runs at a scenario before he can pose a real threat to the heroes. The artwork is lovely, but there's a lot of nudity and nipples, which is either a bracing hommage to Robert E. Howard's testosteronal fantasy novellas or else it's a bit, errr, rape-y, depending on which side of the culture wars you like to fight. Aesthetics aside, it's ideal for club entertainment, being moderately quick to play and light on the brain, but still very thematic and tense.