Hyborian Gates CCG

Hyborian Gates takes the Conan-era Hyborian Age (Robert E. Howard's sword-and-sorcery Earth of pre-Atlantean Cimmeria, Stygia and Aquilonia) and turns it into a full four-player multiplayer CCG built around controlling magical gates between regions.

The game

Published in 1996 by Red Brick (Stratelibri in Italy and SIMBA/Nexus internationally), Hyborian Gates was designed as a multiplayer-first experience at a time when almost every rival CCG was a duel. You field a Hero with a retinue of warriors, wizards and creatures, exploring the Hyborian map, grabbing gates for victory points, and dealing with the other two or three players around the table who are also converging on the same choke points.

The context

It arrived on the heels of the 1995 Conan novels reissue wave and leaned into that pulp revival. The setting was more faithful to Howard than to the Schwarzenegger films, and the art direction went for oil-painting realism rather than comic gloss. Because it was designed by Italian-market studios, a lot of the original flavour text and card names exist in both English and Italian, and the two printings are not identical.

The collector angle

The base set plus the Storm expansion (1997) are the main runs, along with the Hyborian Gates: Shadizar starter deck line. English-market distribution was thin in the US and heavier in Europe, so North American collectors often have to import. The Italian first printings are generally cleaner-cut and on slightly different stock than the English SIMBA/Nexus run, which matters to completionists. Unreleased third-expansion playtest cards occasionally surface in Italian collections and are the holy grail for Hyborian fans.