Review: AGE OF CONAN was a great surprise for me. I was looking for a light strategy game that could be really fun amongst a group of players who could know or not about Conan and enjoy it the same way. It happened.

The components are fairly standard Fantasy Flight quality. A heavy and sturdy box, beautiful mapboard, cards and pieces, some tokens to punch from cardboards and a well designed rulebook a long one, by the way: 23 pages.

About the game itself, it`s very fun. There are a lot of minutia and details and the rules, but they are well explained with examples. Set-up is pretty fast and easy. Like the majority of strategy games, the experience will be better if you play it with the maximum number of players allowed in this case, four. There are dice envolved, used for controlling Conan, resolve battles and intrigue so, yes, luck is a strong factor in the game. Like a lot of Fantasy Flight games, cards are used for more than one purpose.

It`s a very exciting game. All the time you must be expanding your army, following objectives, closing adventures, deciding between gold, sorcery, more army units, building cities, defending your provinces, attacking neutral or enemy provinces, having a good deck of cards etc, etc... This seems like a headache, but it`s not. After one game played, the next one will run smoothly. Remember: the name of the game is AGE OF CONAN, not CONAN THE CIMMERIAN, or CONAN THE BARBARIAN or KING CONAN. So, Conan is just a pawn a very strong one, of course! in the politics and military conflicts of that age. Don`t expect it to be all about CONAN.

I highly recommend this game.