Conan - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

[Music] it's time for icon and review so if you're a fan of axis miniatures death or nipples it's time to get excited Conan is a board game representing years of work from talented designers and artists and it wants to drag you kicking and sweating into Robert E Howard's Hyborian age we've got one very big snake four separate boards no less than ten individual boobs and most importantly eight scenarios I've checked my calculator on this one and that is just your hands that adjust thing that bridges out at 1.25 boobs person area or what a time to be alive so as the proud owner of this game you're going to pick a scenario and you are going to set it up and it's going to look like this now depending on the scenario you've picked you're going to have between one and four people each plane Cronan friends and you're going to have one more player playing the evil overlord dungeon master type person who controls all the monsters who want to kill Caroline or more realistically just stop this homicidal spinning top of a protagonist now they're about 20 things we want to tell you to help you figure out if you should buy this box of brutes and glutes but we're just going to start with how you play as the good guys in this game the missions might have you defeating a band of pirates or rescuing a princess or saving a village or a combination of the three but the play-by-play in this game is all about managing your energy represented by these crystals now every turn you get a free kind of gasp of energy which allows you to move for free a couple of places but after that everything you do costs crystals you know you want to attack a man go for it it's gonna cost you a crystal you want to attack a man and really hurt him that's gonna cost you two crystal oh no but seriously I want this man to die maybe put in four crystals five each of the actions that you can take in a turn has a cap limit on how many crystals you can spend on it in a total turn but it's up to you how many you do them at a time so you can just put one in and have one little or if you really really want to make sure in attack lands you can be like I'm going to put four in at once and have one thick with four dice there are options here and as long as you've got the crystals available and you haven't gone over the cap for that action you can just keep spending on as many things as you want if daddy's got the magic moolah daddy can buy the magic shoes you can run into a room and kill a man and then run out of the room and then run back in kill another man and open a chest and then on out of the room and I'm back in I mean there aren't actually any magic shoes or magic money I made that bell up it's vital to note that characters in count out are powerhouses if these crystals represent the air in your lungs it's possible to Huff it all out in one glorious exhalation of violence clotheslining miniatures off the board but after that all the crystals you spent going the spent box and you only get two back each term unless you decide to have a chilled one you don't do anything but move an attack and then next time you get five back which still isn't enough Matt I can't believe you wrote having a chilled one into the script the manual specifically says it's a cautious stance now system this flexible feels freeing in many regards do you want but at the same time this possibility is kind of an electric buzz that keeps zapping your muscles and encouraging you to behave erratically and oddly turning you into a drunken giddy gambler and going big but most time you want most time you'll play it simple will be conserve a to move and do this keep it calm but the temptation to go big is constantly there you can spend a crystal at any point to re-roll any dice which means everything gradually tends to just slip away from you and you're constantly wanting to do something epic you've got the ghost of Christmas potential carnage waking you up in the middle of the night and just showing you how beautiful the world could be if you just give in if you just let Conan bet everything on red rivers and rivers of read these all out moments give the game an enormous sense of momentum creating the tiny stories of glory on the board that you can clearly in a vision you're suddenly attacked by someone hurry and you kill them and then you kill someone else who's also hairy and then the silence who's maybe less hairy but then you kill him and then you throw your axe across the whole board land it in the chest of an unsuspecting bastard these sudden bursts of potential are what makes Conan amazing but also don't go you know zoom out because these crystals are also what you need to defend yourself and they're also your health so yeah don't don't go too mad but obviously I mean obviously doo doo doo go mad and this this wonderful system of crystals is actually only half of what makes this game so neat the other system that's just as simple and evocative is that if the hero team can alternate their actions all the time as they see fit and that's relevant for two reasons the first of which is that when you're outnumbered in a space it means that everything's harder it means that you pay more crystals for everything so you get stuff like if Conan wants to kill this captain of the other ship shemitah's might move into the space to pair some people off so cannon can make that leap costing less crystals and then shibata's could leave the space and then open a chest and because it only ever costs one crystal to throw and catch something if Sheva Tosh finds a life potion you can throw it to calm down you can catch it drink it become proud up run then do all of them and then what happens right because you've just put in a massive blood soaked gamble and the question is whether that's going to pay off and if it does and you've spent your crystals and you slay that captain you're gonna high-five you're gonna feel great but if you do all that and then you miss that's scary now you're on the enemy ship with pirates all around you and no friends nearby and it should be scary the tension you find in this board game is absolutely the same tension you find in the comment on comics and films were blood lies around every corner and this choreography you get in the board game of players running in helping each other throwing weapons and slaying people to help one another that's the same panic second two second choreography you find in the Conan intellectual property and although it wasn't always entirely intentional much like all the original Conan stuff this game is frequently very funny you can sit and plan and cope with this idea a bit - in there and kill these guys and then when you execute it you can very quickly find yourself running in fumbling your dice roll and oh no it's all over you in fact it all up although thankfully Conan's ability to smash through walls frequently gets you out of all sorts of trouble just two crystals it just smashes through a ball [Music] all the while the friend playing the bad guys gets one hell of a toy to play with whenever the heroes have decided that spending any more crystals would be fine you jump over to the overlord who has their own crystals to play with and spend on movement and defense and rerolls but more importantly they have this the river now if the crystals are fun to fiddle with this is some next-level you can activate any monster group you want or the events of the scenario but they all have a cost and you pay that cost then you all pick up the Cardin ah slide it in at the end and actually for your second monster group of the turn you can even activate it again if you want to pay that cost and this is so much fun you know it's like being set up the controls of a miniatures Mecca or DJing the heroes death Conan's got no stamina left let's pump up the volume [Music] [Music] alright ladies and gents I'd like you all to join me in wishing Conan an 80th birthday doesn't look a day under 75 happy birthday Conan and now it's time to get on board the van Gogh bus overall Conan is strategic without being slow and clever without being complicated which is exactly what you want in an evocative miniatures game but before we set your wallet trembling with fear there are a couple of things we're not too keen on so let's just jump into the first of all the dice every time you're not ready or something awesome like when you're hitting the hardest when you're about to do something mmm well you want to just get a handful dice and explode them of the ball you end up having to just pick up a couple of Reds and re-roll them because you haven't actually got that many of them now there are releasing a retail pack of more dice next year for about $10 and I'm gonna find that well I'm not going to tell you how to live your life but it's probably not a behavior that Conan would deem dishonorable and got you for don't go and got any publishers beyond that we have to start nitpicking so the dump thing in miniatures games these days is to link missions together in a in a story a campaign Conan no you have one off vignettes you play a game of Conan once and then you can play it again or not but actually that's ok you know sometimes these campaigns can feel like a commitment or even a slog in dissenter Imperial assault in particular have this exponential complexity curves yeah heroes gather all these trinkets to them Conan doesn't have that but that then just means that I'd have to balance for a campaign's and lets them get on with the kind of calculations they're good at such as boat plus boat plus rules for leaping between them equals awesome another thing we could try criticizing maybe is that the box says that Conan is a 2 to 5 player game yeah but that all the scenarios in here almost all of them are for an overlord and three heroes and that's actually ok too because Conan plays best with three heroes four against a little choppy and there's not enough room for everybody to express themselves three is great so really Conan is a 2 to 5 player game where some of the time fewer numbers of players just have to control extra heroes by proxy and that's ok too okay what isn't as okay is the fact that sometimes these characters have special abilities that just aren't featured in the mission oh yeah so you might have like mr. Sheva TAS who's really good at opening boxes um and chests but if you're not playing a mission with any chests then he's just a bit useless or with Billy who's the pirate queen in charge of the Pirates and if you're playing on a mission without any pirates that's like her good thing it she hasn't got our Pirates then it's just a bit weird now these differences are okay when you're playing in a full campaign you know you might have a counter this useless on one mission but then they'll get their chance to shine so with this kind of vignette into a dual mission system doesn't really work as well and I mean also the fact that yes it isn't balanced and in a way I get that because Conan is supposed to be Conan and that means that what Conan does is he sort of runs into a room whirls around a little bit and then everything dies I mean that's his job he's sort of like a Roomba but for mortality instead of fluff but still not having to have this balance is cool and it's Conan and I get it and Conan should be the beefy best but it just sometimes means that when you're not playing as Conan you get given another character and you look at the mission you're actually playing it's a bit like being given a wonky third party n64 controller and briefly jumping back to the subject of bolete let's talk about this game's depiction of women because it's bad enough that women or parents might reasonably not want to touch this game with a bargepole so out of Conan's 74 miniatures which just kind of references and this this amount plus a tiny bit more there's actually only two female figurines both of which you're wearing lingerie uh you've got queen bleats is the only playable one who looks less like she's owning commuity and more like she's a promotional model at a convention who really can't wait to just go home have a bath and then possibly quite a lot of ice cream and then we have lady number two a generic woman who is sometimes using the campaigns as a princess other times as a hasn't priest which kind gives you a little bit of clear about the OneNote depiction going on the front of the hero's manual features are the picture woman who clearly is so relaxed about Conan's ability to save her that she's actually just having a nap and in the first mission it even says that after the hero's discover her she counts as an object and it's like yeah you've you've made that quite clear an argument that I thought might be fair and was willing to hear out about this wincing ly 1930s depiction of women in the 2016 board game is that this is some kind of historical document right monolith have talked in the past about working with a Robert Howard historian to keep them on the straight and narrow so to have women in some kind of different role in Conan be to pave over Howard's original vision but then actually we did a lot of research into this and something interesting is that this game already paves over how its original vision to do with race right so this is Robert II how its Hyborian age and if you look it looks like our world right as Africa there's Asia that's because Howard tybor Ian's age is meant to be our world before the dawn of recorded history so in the original code and stories you have the nation of Keita who are ethnically Chinese and who Howard chose to make dark Sorcerer's Conan doesn't like magic and so then you have Conan's natural enemy being the Chinese early next year monolith are actually releasing an expansion set in key time but predictably they're not filling it with ethnically Chinese miniatures it looks like they're going from one generic dark wizard look and actually in this base set you got a whole lot of picked miniatures now Conan's picks were a sort of tribe inspired by the Iroquois right but what we get here is a more troglodyte looking people and that makes sense too because obviously you don't want a game where Conan cuts down Native Americans by the Dozen so my point is that what monolith approved here is that they don't want to go near Conan's racism what they've also done is said that they're fine embracing the sexism they're not objective historians and it know we've done our homework we've realized it's never as simple as that if you'd like to see what Conan looks like with a more modern hand on the tiller last year Brian wood and Becky Cloonan collaborate on a reboot of the Conan comic that actually starts with the story word bolete first appears and you still get a topless bolete seduced by butch Conan the web elite is terrifying her sexuality is more in her control rather than her being swept along by this male protagonist and she gets to meet a leaner more athletic Conan who's drawn for female gays and arguably more true to Howard's original vision of Conan the whole thing is still unquestionably to use monoliths consulting historians own words true to the atmosphere and philosophy of Conan but everybody wins so I mean totally it's less defensible than a thought made of cake but it is what it is and it's up to you how much you care about that oh where are we going where are we going now remember all right Evan I know having a good time having a good time dead offended added it I'm give me a beer well well what are we doing in the review again I think we were saying have fun this game is fun it's really fun how iCarly the last time we played a fun game we ruin any fun games before God you know I don't think we've reviewed any fun game well we have now oh boy is this the play where I do a joke about what is best in life ha no because that movie is a masterpiece and I'm not going to reduce it to a meme by taking John Milius his best work and just turning into a joke yeah not under my roof yes dad mmm but it does cost 70 pounds which is what two games cost sometimes and 70 pounds is a lot of money or maybe it isn't I haven't looked at the economy this morning Oh but if you're still in the fence then we'd recommend we might nudge you off that fence towards the side of waiting till 2017 don't fall off an actual fence it's a metaphor you'll hurt yourself yeah yeah yeah the thing is you know at the moment there's only eight scenarios and you might want to go onto that website and see how many more there are because for 70 quid you really are looking at wanting more scenarios to get your money's worth you can probably try all of Conan's scenarios in a week of playing and then it's just replaying them which isn't quite the extravagance and luxury we want that said if you're an amateur game designer we think it should push you off the fence the other way you know I've never played a game in five years of doing shall we sit down that has so many toys and trinkets and spells and tables and wells for you to play with there is something tokens and spells an item in this game that literally aren't used at all crying out for designer to figure out what to do with them this game these components feels to me to a creative person like an all-you-can-eat buffet or like more like an all you can produce buffer don't go to a buffet and produce as much as you can though that's a that's a mess phone you will hurt yourself absolutely the other problem is the fact that this is a kick-started game which means that yes you're going to have community people putting together cool scenarios but people who got the kick-started version of the game has more stuff which means if the majority of the community which is based off the Kickstarter thing which is likely initially are making certain scenarios for the miniature the miniatures and bits in this then it means if you buy it in the shop now so so it's not a sure thing that the base set will get a huge amount scenarios it's probable just wait just make sure hold off see what happens hmm but hey while you're waiting why not learn to kill a real man with a real sword is Paul Dehn reporting live from Vancouver with an inexplicable segment on sword fighting Thank You Quinn's so who knew but it turns out there's an increasing number of places around the world that will let you an adult according to at least the Lewis definition of the phrase to actually pick up and use a sword against other consenting parties and I'm not talking about Olympic fencing here and while I'm sure there is a lot of nobility in shuffling back and forward and doing the pokes I'm talking about the growing love for what's called Western martial arts or historical European martial arts and that means things a little more dynamic like the rapier or the longsword or if you're very lucky maybe a quarterstaff as well these are the weapons of history but they're also the weapons of high fantasy and here's the thing a single person effectively trained in the use of one of his weapons is basically a warrior you are a warrior have you ever tried using a sword if you've never done it before have you actually tried it you're rubbish you I'm rubbish go on try but a little bit of practice try it out and you will actually be able to floor three rubbish people in a row you will be able to beat them you will basically be on the way to becoming Conan you will be 60% Conan you will be Cohn now I'm all right I'm not actually really a trained warrior yet but I'm better than I used to be and if like if there was a fight I could easily defeat - probably - goblins or maybe like an orc if those late if there was an orc over there and you're like ah there's an orc I'd be like don't worry I'll deal with the orc you can deal with do the shopping or something go and get groceries the point is now that I've been doing this for a while fencing for a while I've come to increasingly appreciate a that is way better than going to the gym for like being active and getting out and doing interesting things so much better than that and be it's not about rule force it's not actually about what you might think a world of Conan is anyway it's not macho muscled chunky meat men it's about control over clout and precision over power it's actually an exercise that's about discipline and it's about intelligence and it's about dedication and if you like playing games and getting better at games you could really really like fencing but if you just want to do this because you think it'll be exciting to run around with swords and weigh those about and sort of you know be a bit cool and swashbuckling that's okay that's a reason that a lot of people are doing it because it's just really good it's also increasingly inclusive I'm sure it will depend maybe partly on where you go and then where you are but where I go in Vancouver the school is run by women is usually diverse I don't want anyone to think that they can't pick up a sword and start doing this based on on who they are what societies societies assumptions might be of what they are supposed to do you too can fence but you too can also look very very cool with a sword and like me doing it for a little while you can also kill a goblin or an orc it's actually a man over there I'm in a better curve thanks Paul and if you'd like to have a go sword fighting you can print off your very own free paper fighting sword and our digital website so just head straight over to TT TP Cola how long /ee slant or / www.vitac.com [Music] forward thanks for watching bye [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 349,587

Rating: 4.6814957 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Conan, Miniatures

Id: rScrsSUm8Ns

Length: 23min 41sec (1421 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/refudiat0r]

Paul Dean's inexplicable segments should really be a regular thing.

I love him so much!

[u/Snake5872]

Was interested but the kickstarter having extra minis and possible incompatibility issues with future stuff makes me sure ill be waiting a while into 2017 until i consider this.

[u/jalkazar]

Shut Up and Sit Down are great and I've only recently started watching and enjoying their reviews. You get a good feel of the game, a ton of nice comedy and best of all, and perhaps something very few do, their criticism doesn't stop at "was this fun or not" but they also discuss and criticize parts of a game that might be sensitive or might reinforce certain stereotypes and ideals. It's both enlightening and educational. In this video they do a great piece about the portrayal of women in the game and how the publishers mission statement merely seems like an excuse to keep their women barely dressed. I remember them doing a good job talking about similar issues in Istanbul as well.

Great job guys!

[u/boybogart]

That slip from Quinns got me choking on my dinner, freaking hilarious!

[u/Uthred]

Seems a mistake to make Valeria a Kickstarter Exclusive and have Tits McGee as the default female character.

[u/jonboyjon1990]

Another great vid. Hilarious action sequences.

[u/eckswyezed]

Ugh. Auto correct changed Sit to Sitara thereby revealing a name from my past...

[u/NotAChaosGod]

Thank you SU&SD. No interest in buying an incomplete game, which is what the retail distribution looks like.

I hate Kickstarters which do this.

[u/Wuktrio]

Coincidentally I just came back from my longsword HEMA class and seeing the shout out in the video is great!