Conan CCG

Well, to get this blog back to more adult topics, let’s look at a little game that came out in 2006. Comic Images published the Conan CCG. It seems it wasn’t succesful enough to justify any expansions. So this one has only 196 cards.

Conan is based on stories by Robert E. Howard, which were published in the Weird Tales magazine starting in 1932. Of course the barbarian is best known for his two movies with Arnold Schwarenegger in the lead role. A third movie is planned for 2010, while a TV series from the 90s was quickly forgotten. Also a the MMO “Age of Conan” is still alive. The card game is based on the stories with drawn pictures.

In the CCG each player plays his own Conan, who has to collect enough Renown points to win the game. One player is the active player who fights foes which are played by the other players against him. Each defeated foe is worth renown points, while they threaten to kill Conan and thus eliminate that player or at least force him to retreat at the cost of renown. The foes come from an extra deck.

So tha basic principle is similar to the Lord of the Rings game and is simple enough. Survive with the help of items and allies and press on, if you think you can defeat another waves of attackers. The problem in my view is the complicated combat system. attackers come can attack from four different directions. They are enhanced by hidden moves cards. The active player then plays his Conan’s moves to fight the foes or he retreats.

I found the rules rather complicated, containing a number of exceptions to a lot of  rules. I think this is the weakness of this game: All you can do is play one of eight different versions of Conan, who slashes his way through waves of attacking enemies. Sounds like it could be fun for a fast and simple game. But here you would have to invest in learning rules which are equally complex than the rules of other games, which offer much more different strategies and things for you to do in the game. It gets worse with the tournament rules: Your foe deck must contain at least 25 cards with a total renown between 95 and 105. Have fun counting…

Of course the limited card pool also doesn’t help. The rules say, you can play the way of the barbarian or the way of the tief. But the latter will be made available in an expansion. Then region cards add a bit of flavor and modify the rules fore the fight. But the core set only contains two region cards. There are only five different ally cards, one of them is the “Helpless Victim”.

Perhaps I’m ignorant to the qualities of the game, but I’m not surprised that this one failed on the market. Perhaps it is fun when one masters the combat system with different tactics, but then again without expansions one can safely say that the possibilities for different strategies are limited.

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