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Vintage Treasures: Valkenburg Castle

Vintage Treasures: Valkenburg Castle

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Valkenburg CastleAll this recent talk of Star Fleet Battles and Metagaming’s classic microgames like Ogre and Wizard has me thinking of other great pocket games of my youth.

Now, “great” is a relative term. The elements that make a typical fantasy board game great — things like style, richness of setting, and diversity of play — don’t apply to microgames. The things that make a pocket game great are inventiveness, fast play, and simplicity.

Although a great setting and a little style don’t hurt, either.

Task Force Games was the king of pocket games in the early 1980s. Much of that was by virtue of its one runaway success, Star Fleet Battles; but it had an impressive line of other fantasy and SF titles, including Swordquest (which I discussed last June); Starfire (which eventually inspired a series of science fiction novels from David Weber and Steve White); Intruder, which pits a desperate crew against a lethal alien in deep space (clearly inspired by the movie Alien); Spellbinder; City States of Arklyrell; and over a dozen more (there’s a nice survey here and a complete list here).

But Valkenburg Castle was the first, and it’s still my favorite. It was almost completely unique in 1980 — a board game that captured the essential gestalt of fantasy role playing, although in a slightly abstracted fashion: penetrating a dark and foreboding stronghold, confronting the unwholesome creatures within, and winning glory through cleverness and force of arms.

The premise of Valkenburg Castle was simple. You play as the young Lord Hobart van Valkenburg, rightful heir, returning at last to the place where his grandfather was murdered and his family first driven into exile. The castle is now monster-infested, home to sinister and powerful beasts who lurk somewhere in its depths.

To win back his ancestral home, Lord Hobart must explore the twisting ruins of a castle he has never before seen and drive out the dark forces who have made it their home — including the powerful creatures who lair at the deepest dungeons levels.

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Explore History Through Tiny Cardboard Counters with Against the Odds Magazine

Explore History Through Tiny Cardboard Counters with Against the Odds Magazine

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Against-the-Odds-magazine-35-smallI discovered something fascinating while I was trolling eBay for vintage fantasy board games this morning: Against the Odds, a magazine published out of Southeastern, PA, which includes a complete game in each issue.

Now, it’s true that I get a little giddy around magazines. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have published one for a decade. And I also love games. So magazines that include games? I had to go have a bit of a lie down.

Against the Odds is a quarterly periodical of history and simulation, and it looks remarkably similar to the great gaming magazines published by SPI, Strategy & Tactics and Ares, both of which included a game with each issue. Ares, published between 1980 and 1984, was one of my all-time favorite magazines. In that short span it brought over a dozen highly regarded games into the world, including Barbarian Kings, Star Trader, Nightmare House, The High Crusade (based on the Poul Anderson novel), Citadel of Blood, and many others. All 17 issues are currently available as free PDFs at Archive.org.

Against the Odds doesn’t have the same focus on fantasy and science fiction as Ares, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fascinating. The first issue I came across, #35 (December 2011), includes the game Boudicca: The Warrior Queen, featuring an historical clash between the Roman Empire and a loose collection of Celtic tribes on the barbaric island of Britannia in 61 A.D.

She meant “trouble” for the Roman occupation of Britain. After her revolt succeeded in burning three major towns and slaughtering tens of thousands of Roman citizens and allies, the Emperor Nero seriously considered whether this distant land was worth the cost to stay. Governor G.S. Paulinus’ remarkable victory – perhaps at the location later known as “Watling Street” – reaffirmed Roman domination. They would remain in Britain for over 300 more years.

But it might have been different. Can you as the leader of a various cluster of independent Celtic tribes cause enough trouble and loss to make the Romans leave your island? Can you as the commander of scattered Roman troops snuff out the rebellion more effectively than Paulinus? Will London burn or be saved? These are your challenges in ATO issue #35, Boudicca: The Warrior Queen by Richard Berg.

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New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

New Treasures: Federation Commander: Klingon Border

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Federation Commander Klingon BorderIn honor of the US release of Star Trek Into Darkness this week, I found some of my favorite Star Trek games in the basement, and hugged them.

Took longer than you might expect. Turns out there are a lot of decent Star Trek titles. Over a dozen board games, for example — starting with West End’s terrific 1985 contributions, the paragraph-based Star Trek The Adventure Game and the more family-friendly The Enterprise Encounter, all the way up to Wizkids’ 2011 deluxe releases, Reiner Knizia’s solitaire/cooperative mission game Star Trek Expeditions and the strategic space exploration/ship-to-ship combat title Star Trek – Fleet Captains. Not to mention last year’s oddball Star Trek Catan from Mayfair Games.

Let’s not neglect the role playing games, starting with FASA’s classic 1983 Star Trek The Role Playing Game and the updated RPG from Last Unicorn Games in 1999. And of course, numerous card, deck-building, and collectible games, like Star Trek HeroClix from WizKids.

That’s not including dozens of computer and video games, starting with SSI’s unlicensed Apple II space-combat title The Warp Factor (1982), to the text-based The Promethean Prophecy (Simon & Schuster, 1984) and the classic adventure games from Interplay like Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992) and Judgment Rites (1993). I could go on, but my fingers are tired already.

But the great-granddaddy of Star Trek games has to be Star Fleet Battles, which began as a 1979 pocket game released in a zip-lock bag by Task Force Games and has grown into one of the largest franchises in table-top gaming, with countless expansions and variants from a small handful of publishers over the last three decades.

The title which got the warmest hug during my basement walkabout, and likely the one I’d grab if I were to be marooned on a lonely asteroid with a group of fellow Star Trek gamers, was Federation Commander: Klingon Border, a Star Fleet Battles mega-game which challenges you to take the helm of a Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser and hold the border during a massive Klingon invasion.

Admit it — that sounds like fun.

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New Treasures: Cyclades

New Treasures: Cyclades

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Cyclades board gameI saw the original release of Clash of the Titans, starring Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith, on opening night in 1981. As just about anyone who’s seen it can tell you, it’s not a very good movie, with a painfully flat performance by Harry Hamlin as Perseus and clumsy attempts to add kid appeal with a nonsensical robot owl.

In the middle of a tale involving Pegasus, three blind witches, Medusa, and the Kraken, Hollywood feels the need to add a robot owl. I mean, come on.

But it didn’t matter. I loved it with a wild passion, and it ignited an intense interest in Ancient Greece in me.

I read everything I could get my hands on, from Homer to Aeschylus, Euripides to Aristophanes. I visited the library and asked to see maps of ancient Athens, circa 500 B.C. And I scrapped our ongoing D&D campaign, set in a generic medieval landscape, and told my bemused players we’d be starting over in Athens, at the height of the Bronze Age.

I discovered the history of the Cyclades, the tight knot of islands off the coast of Greece, that I learned had been packed with tiny civilizations and numerous isolated cultures over the centuries. It was a perfect setting for a fantasy game: a maze of islands thick with myth and mystery, a stone’s throw from the great city states that birthed modern civilization. The D&D campaign that began there carried on for over a decade, and was easily the most successful and rewarding one I’ve ever played.

But I always wondered why I didn’t see the setting used more often. So you can imagine how I felt when the fantasy board game Cyclades was released in 2009. I bought a copy last month, and so far I’ve been very pleased with it.

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Weird of Oz Reminisces: A Friend of the Imagination

Weird of Oz Reminisces: A Friend of the Imagination

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cobra_hiss_When I say “a friend of the imagination,” I do not mean an imaginary friend. Shane was, and is, real. The only son of one of my mom’s dear friends, he loomed large in the first decade of my life, though I only saw him about once a year.

I’m sure that when you cast your mind back to that first, formative era — to the halcyon days of youth that began your journey and shaped its course in ways both obvious and subtle — you recall some friend or acquaintance who holds a special place in your own private history’s pantheon of important people. Perhaps he or she first introduced you to something — an idea or hobby or sport — that would prove to be a lifetime love, a lifelong pursuit.

Shane was one such person, a boy who unwittingly (and, perhaps to this day, unbeknownst to him) enriched my creativity and broadened my imagination. I can’t help but think his example had some impact on my career as a creative writer; it was, at least, one branch in the confluence of influences that brought me here to this moment, writing a blog for Black Gate.

Shane’s mom had grown up with mine but moved to California, so about once a year she and her son came to visit us in Arizona. These visits account for some of my earliest and fondest memories. To them I can trace important moments in the unfolding path I have followed. Granted, some of these imaginative leaps might have come in other circumstances had Shane never come from that faraway country sung about by the Beach Boys. There were many other seminal formative events, particular authors and movies (it is a time of life that is littered with such discoveries, naturally), but Shane happened to be the one who nudged my imagination along on almost an annual basis throughout my grade-school years, like a sensei who periodically appears and says, “All right. You’re ready for the next level. And this one is particularly rad and gnarly.” (Okay, I can’t recall if he actually used ‘80s surfer slang, but I think he did use some. We all did. It was in the air.)

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Vintage Treasures: The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

Vintage Treasures: The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

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The Awful Green Things From Outer SpaceI keep promising myself I’m going to stop obsessing about games that have been out of print for decades.

Clearly, I’m a man of little character. Let’s not dwell on that. Let’s dwell instead on one of the great mini-games of all time, Tom Wham’s The Awful Green Things From Outer Space.

First, a bit of history to support that claim. The Awful Green Things From Outer Space originally appeared as an insert in Dragon Magazine #28 (published in 1979). That’s pretty great.

Great enough to be reprinted as a full-fledged standalone game by Dungeons and Dragons publisher TSR in 1980, anyway. In 1988, Steve Jackson Games, publishers of GURPS, acquired the rights and revived Awful Green Things as a pocket game, alongside other mini-games like Ogre, GEV, Car Wars, and Illuminati.

Even in august company like that, Awful Green Things stood out for its gonzo humor and original design. I was going to paraphrase the text on the back, but there’s really no way to distill it. Here it is in its entirety:

The crew of the exploration ship Znutar just wanted to cruise around the Galaxy, discovering strange new worlds and playing pool. But then their ship was invaded by the Awful Green Things. And suddenly they were fighting for their lives!

In this wacky two-player game, one person takes the part of the Awful Green Things. Every turn the monsters multiply and grow… especially if they can eat somebody! The other player commands the crew, frantically trying weapon after weapon in hopes of defeating . . . The Awful Green Things from Outer Space!

The pocket edition consisted of a resealable box about the size of a paperback, 137 full-color counters (and a ziplock bag to keep ’em in), 24 pages of rules; and a 12″ x 21″ color map. The game was copiously illustrated by creator Tom Wham and Beverly Hale. My copy doesn’t have a price tag, but I think it was around 8 bucks. You can buy an updated, boxed edition from Steve Jackson Games for $24.99, but the pocket edition is still the one to get if you can find it.

Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

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monsters-monsters-smallSome 35 years ago, I read an article in The Space Gamer on an unusual little game called Monsters! Monsters!

I’m not even sure I’d played D&D when I first read about Monsters! Monsters! I was introduced to fantasy gaming by Metagaming, and specifically their brilliant mini-games Ogre, Melee, and Wizard, all designed by Steve Jackson.

Orge everyone knows about — if you didn’t play the game at the lunch table in high school when it was first released in 1977, then you’re probably aware of last year’s Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly a million dollars for a massive 14-pound Designer’s Edition.

I doubt every copy of Ogre in the world in 1977 totalled 14 pounds. I think Ogre may have the unique distinction of being the simplest and most spare SF game ever created, and now it’s also the largest.

Anyway, it was Melee and Wizard that first taught me all about role playing. I rolled my first attack dice in a school cafeteria in 1978 (I missed). The rules were simple, the miniatures were made of paper, but the magic was exactly as advertised. I carried those games in my back pocket for years, and my friends and I were die-hard Metagaming fans long before we stepped into our first dungeon.

Metagaming’s house organ was the magazine The Space Gamer, where they advertised upcoming releases, chatted about the industry, and generally talked up their games. It was there I first learned of the wider world of role playing, and where I discovered an odd little game called Monsters! Monsters! that they released in 1976.

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Belfort Board Game and Kickstarter Expansion

Belfort Board Game and Kickstarter Expansion

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belfort-componentsIn the board game Belfort (Amazon), you are trying to complete the building of a city before the snow season arrives, along with the accompanying yeti attacks. This gives you seven months (or rounds) to prove your mettle by completing more of the project than your rival architects.

Toward this end, you carry out the following activities:

  • Recruit a team of elves and dwarves to gather wood, stone, and metal resources, as well as gold coins
  • Buy and sell resources at the trading post
  • Buy property cards, representing new properties you can build
  • Earn income from your properties and pay taxes
  • Use wood, stone, and metal resources to build new properties within the town, which provide various benefits
  • Hire gnomes to work at your properties to gain the benefits from them
  • Send your elves or dwarves to guilds (randomly determined each game) to gain benefits

To get a sense for the flow of the game, you may also check out this YouTube video. The graphics of the game are fun and engaging, giving it a lot of personality compared to other games of this type and even inspiring a charming comic book (read the digital version here) that brings the dwarf/elf rivalry to life.

The creators of Belfort are now releasing an expansion – currently funding on Kickstarter until May 9 – which will allow you to hire Assistants that provide special benefits. Or you can forego the Assistant benefit to get an expansion permit which augments an existing property, such as adding a Pool to the Inn or an Archives onto the Library. These property expansions provide scoring bonuses for those who have them, giving the potential edge you need to win the game.

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Vintage Bits: Sword of Aragon

Vintage Bits: Sword of Aragon

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Sword of AragonI’m a huge fan of computer games, and especially role playing games. Perhaps the thing I enjoy most about them is they’re so clearly descended from the hobby I loved as a teen — desktop role playing and Dungeons and Dragons, itself a direct descendent of Sword & Sorcery as written by Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Fritz Leiber.

The things I cherished as a young man have grown up and conquered Western Civilization. The only thing that could be better would be if the Spider-Man and Avengers comics I zealously collected forty years ago suddenly spawned billion-dollar media properties — but come on, what are the chances of that?

But back to computer games. This isn’t going to be a computer-games-aren’t-as-great-as-they-used-to-be diatribe. The fact is, modern computer games are fabulous. I can sit on my couch for hours and be thoroughly entertained watching my son play games like Arkham City, Heavy Rain, Borderlands and Enslaved. These are truly immersive experiences, with captivating plots, great characters, and outstanding pacing.

Still, you’ll notice that I didn’t say I played these games. No, my enjoyment these days is pretty much limited to watching Drew play.

I don’t game much any more. That’s not because the games suck; it’s because I grew up with a very different kind of gaming experience, and the games I want to play just aren’t made any more.

I’m not asking for the industry to roll back 20 years. What I really want to do is play all those great old games once more — something that is sadly impossible, unless I can find a way to get my old IBM 286 machine to boot up again.

What games are those? Old school dungeon-crawls, like Wizardry, Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Master, and Dragon Wars. Science Fiction RPGs like Starflight and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. Adventure games like The Lurking Horror and The Secret of Monkey Island. And tactical wargames like MechCommander.

And especially the brilliant blend of wargaming, role playing, and adventure gaming that is the underrated classic Sword of Aragon, one of the finest fantasy games ever made.

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Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

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Thieve's World Chaosium-smallThere was a time when shared-world fantasy was brand new, and taking the genre by storm. That time was 1979, and the man at the helm was Robert Lynn Asprin, a midlist novelist who had never edited anything before in his life.

Robert Lynn Asprin was the guest of honor at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, Maplecon 2 in Ottawa in 1979. He was a spirited and self-deprecating guest, telling stories of Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson gently correcting his spelling and grammar (“These are the people I’m supposed to be editing?!”) as he midwifed the birth of what would become one of the most successful fantasy franchises of the 20th Century: Thieves’ World, the Ace paperback anthology that triggered an explosion in shared world fantasy over the next two decades. Thieves’ World eventually encompassed thirteen collections and over half a dozen original novels, published between 1979 and 2004.

It wasn’t the only new trend to emerge at the end of the 70s in fantasy fiction — in fact, it wasn’t even the biggest. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons was cresting at the same time, and with the publication of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first DragonLance novel, in 1984, the two genres finally collided, and neither would ever be the same again.

As fantasy fiction and gaming gradually blended throughout the 80s, it didn’t just mean that bookstores were flooded with gaming novels. Gaming stores likewise were invaded with a new generation of book-inspired titles, from Iron Crown’s Middle Earth Role Playing to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and TSR’s Conan and Lankhmar properties, just to name a few.

These two juggernauts of 20th Century fantasy, Thieves World and role playing, came together in 1981 with the release of the Thieves’ World boxed set from Chaosium, a singular accomplishment that has been called the “Rosetta Stone of early roleplaying.”

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