One of the things that has made it frustrating for a number of our players is the randomness that Conan seems to exhibit. One way we have considered dealing with this is for each player to be dealt a hand of 4 adventure cards and at the start of each age the adventure deck is made by each player contributing 1 of his cards to the deck face down then they are shuffled and the game plays out as normal. This idea should not unbalance the game at all and only enhance stategy elements.

We have also toyed with the idea of placing an additional face down adventure tile as the last adventure tile of an adventure and that tile is either awarded to the Conan player if Conan is at his destintion when it would be taken (in lieu of drawing a randome one) or it would be turned in for gold or spell tokens by the player taking it. This would extend the adventure by one more court/crown action die each adventure (the cashed in adventure token would return to the pool of tokens though. In the case of the conan reaching his destination and the last token being taken by the non conan player the token is cashed in and the conan player draws a random as normal. This just adds a little bit of length to the adventures and gives more opportunity to play out strategies that may involve conan. We found that bidding for conan with one die left in the pool then rerolling a bunch of crowns when you wanted to use military actions really bites because the adventure is over before it even begins and you basicly wasted your bid for conan. By at least increasing the number of crown die needed to complete an adventure it gave a bit more reliability to bidding for conan and actually being able to use him. This idea should not imbalance the game at all but it will definitely add to the length of adventures/ages and allow more strategy to "play out" rather than simply be nuked by a die roll.

These are just Ideas we had that we thought might help with a bit of the "degenerate" results that the random elements of the game can produce. Otherwise Its a really cool game

Let me know what you think.

The preprogrammed adventure deck seems like a neat idea.

On the other hand, I don't see a problem whith the duration of the adventures. If there are only a few dice (or none) left when bidding, then It would be a good Idea not to bid to high. Always bid for Conan according to the degree of his usefulness. If you think you might not control Conan for long, then use the numbers 3 or 0, and play a card that you really have no need for. Balance is everithing in this game.

Very interesting idea! After reading your preset adventure deck option I came out with something similiar. How about giving each player 4 adventure cards at the stat of the game which would be used after they win the bid for Conan. When a player wins the bid then he chooses one of his adventure cards and says that the barbarian will go there and there. And each new age you will be given new 4 cards (after discarding the previous ones).

Although I don't think that making each adventure last longer is that nice - it's your choice as a Conan player to either use him where you need him or rush towards the objective marker.