Does anyone play with any variants? I like AoC, but I think it's a little flat, especially in the last age when the player who crowns Conan almost always wins. I'm looking for suggestions.

Could players also include any house rules they play with all the time?

We play with double VPs for objectives (Hyborian Kingdom, Sorcerous Nation, etc.). The VP rewards for completing objectives are too low to really matter.

True, after a couple of games I decided to tell all players to view the objectives as a bonus: it's ok to get it, but if you can conquer a region instead, do it!

Making Conan stronger wouldn't solve the issue of giving the Conan player during the last age an edge. Actually, I don't see what it would do at all. Instead I'd say, take an analytical look at the game and really (I mean: REALLY! ) go through the game and think of what you should be doing. Too many players play and at the end of the second or the beginning of the third age realize they don't have enough Adventure tokens to even get a shot at crowning Conan - or keeping someone else from crowning Conan, for that matter. And that's the problem. YOU KNOW that the game will most likely end with someone trying to crown Conan. So what you need to do is either

• gather so many Empire Points that it doesn't matter if someone else crowns Conan

or

• grab as many Adventure tokens as you possibly can and make sure that nobody else will even dare try crowning Conan.

What will ultimately happen is this: everyone will get all the Adventure tokens they can and at the same time go wreaking havoc on their neighboring regions and conquering all they can. Sure, whoever will try to crown Conan will still get a shot at winning, but it's no longer so obvious.

i dont fully agree. In the games i played i noticed thats was sometimes more worthy to make connan help in the conquest, so doing direct victory points , than rushing it to his objective just for the sake of getting the edge of the adventure tokens.

Of course this is situational, but for me Conan is already very good, if u have 5 units more Conan, u don't even need to use the adventure cards for the conquest.... and so save the adventure card for the next bid (sometimes) . Also u make your adversary less inclined to try to get your conan protected land.

WOW , great ideas , sounds like alot of fun .