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Conan Deep Dive
What the Community Thinks About Conan
Across podcast top-lists and channel countdowns, Conan keeps landing as an example of a board game that channels its source material with real conviction. The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast picked it purely for its storytelling potential, pointing to Robert E. Howard's original short stories as the reason each scenario feels like a different tale. The Discriminating Gamer ranked it highly on a personal countdown of favorite games and called out the river activation system as the reason it stuck with them. Both channels frame Conan as a fantasy game with real atmosphere rather than a generic dungeon crawler with a licensed skin.
Not every take is frictionless. BoardGameBollocks enjoyed the theme and called the game thematically immaculate, but found the rulebook confusing enough that players end up guessing at how some interactions are meant to resolve. Drive Thru Games landed in a similar spot: the ideas underneath are interesting, but the rules needed a rewrite after launch, and the game never fully hooked that reviewer across every scenario in the box. The disagreement is less about the theme, which every channel praises, and more about how much friction the rules add to getting there.
Core Mechanics That Define Conan
The River Activation System
The Discriminating Gamer's description centers on what they call the river: a character is activated and then slides down a track, and activating that same character again becomes progressively more expensive. To reset the cost, other units have to be activated and moved across to the far side of the river before the original character becomes affordable to use again. The reviewer singles this system out as the mechanical hook that made the fantasy setting come alive at the table.
Energy Exchange Between Heroes and the Overlord
Drive Thru Games describes an asymmetric back-and-forth built into the action economy: the hero team spends energy cubes to take their actions, and that spent energy flows to whichever player is running the opposition, fueling their response. The reviewer compares the feel of that exchange to the way Imperial Assault or Descent hand the overseeing player more resources as the other side acts, so the more the heroes push, the more the Overlord has to hit back with.
The Conan Experience
A Different Short Story Every Scenario
The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast picked Conan specifically because each scenario plays out like its own Robert E. Howard short story. In one mission Conan is on a pirate ship fighting pirates, and in the next he is sneaking around a tavern, with the scenario book supplying only a couple of sentences of setup before players fill in the rest through play. That channel says the scenario variety is what lets a group effectively write their own Conan stories session to session.
Miniatures and Art Pulled From the Books
Drive Thru Games notes that the game arrived with a lot of familiar art rendered in miniature form, and that the scenarios draw on stories from the books rather than the films. BoardGameBollocks describes the presentation in similar terms, saying it takes the flavor of the source material and puts it directly on the table, backing up a really fun game to play.
What Makes Conan Stand Out
Built With Howard Expertise Behind It
The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast points to the care Monolith put into the Kickstarter edition, bringing in what the hosts describe as Conan experts to keep the scenarios and art compatible with Howard's original vision, including removing period material the hosts call insensitive. That reviewer credits this attention with making the game feel like an authentic extension of the source stories rather than a loose licensed reskin.
An Action System That Spread to Other Games
Both The Discriminating Gamer and Drive Thru Games point out that the activation system underneath Conan did not stay exclusive to it. The Discriminating Gamer notes that Monolith later reused the river system for Batman Gotham City Chronicles, and Drive Thru Games separately points to a different game, Batman: Adventures, that ran on what they describe as the same underlying system. That reuse is a sign the design held up well enough to become a system of its own beyond just this one release.
Potential Drawbacks
Price and Table Footprint
The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast flags Conan as pricey, and pairs that with a note about how many miniatures come in the box, which adds setup weight for a casual pickup session compared with the games covered alongside it.
Rules That Take Work to Parse
BoardGameBollocks found the rules a little weird and difficult to make sense of, describing the play experience as hitting and hoping through unclear interactions rather than following clean, confident rulings. Drive Thru Games had a related complaint, noting the rulebook had issues that needed a redo after the game's initial run, and that despite liking the ideas, the game never fully pulled that reviewer through every scenario in the box.
If You Enjoy Conan
The Discriminating Gamer draws a direct line from Conan to Batman Gotham City Chronicles, noting that Monolith carried the river activation system into that later game. Drive Thru Games points instead to Batman: Adventures, describing it as a different game built on what they call the same system as Conan. Anyone drawn to Conan for that particular activation puzzle has a reason to look at either one.
What Reviewers Are Saying
"My third and final pick is Conan, and I picked this because I read so many of those Conan short stories and they're all kind of different from each other, right? And then you play this game and you can write your own Conan stories of what's going on here, cuz each scenario is totally different from the last one: one he's on a pirate ship fighting pirates, then he's sneaking around in a tavern. It's like weird things are going on, but it's fun and it's very thematic to the original stories."
— The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast
"This is great game that has the river system. So essentially you have Conan and his friends, and it's an all-in-one game because one player is playing all of the enemies. And you have, as I say, the river, and the river is great because what you do here is you can activate a character and then you slide them down."
— The Discriminating Gamer
"Thematically, this game is immaculate. It takes the flavor of the books and the movies and dumps them on your dining room table, and it's a really fun game to boot. Conan, one of the better miniature skirmish games."
— BoardGameBollocks