Category: Classic Reviews

Dedicated to preserving older reviews by our staff from other locations

12/9/15

Classic Reviews: Runebound 2nd Ed

Runebound might be the best adventure you can fit into one evening.  Players have the latitude to customize their characters and pursue their paths to victory, using a variety of strategies.  Build your own hero and save the realm, in one afternoon. ~

Brant Guillory, 9 December 2015

  • Pros:  Well-balanced, nifty movement mechanics, gorgeous.
  • Cons:  Little interaction between players, needs a lot of table space.

Some gamers love the intricate role-playing game full of soliloquies, conspiracy theories, and more character development than a British melodrama.  Others would rather dispense with the backstory, role-play an archetypal character, and kick butt.  In the early days of computer games, most fantasy ‘role-playing’ was the former, not the latter.  Runebound strikes me as one of these computer games, transported to a board game environment.

And don’t think that’s a negative in any way.  Some of the most fun I had in my teenage years was in front of Pool of Radiance and the Wizardry series.  These games were fantasy adventures, but not necessarily fantasy role-playing.  Runebound understands the difference.

RB-classic

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08/26/15

Classic Reviews: Enchanted Locations

Brant Guillory, 26 August 2015

Flip through it, and compare your needs to the price tag. But don’t just drop $30 on a book full of maps, because the B&W maps aren’t as useful as you might think, and the supporting information is sparse.

Yeah, it’s several years old, but I got it one summer at Origins. And there’s no review of it in the archives (ed note: “the archives” of the original site), so for a lot of you, Enchanted Locations may be new to you, too.

This book is from Fast Forward Entertainment, and was put together by James Ward, one of the “grandfathers” of the game. It is d20 compatible.

First Impressions

This book looks good. It chock full of maps, which gamers love. In truth, that’s one of the main reasons I grabbed it. I’m a map geek – a seriously cartography-addicted gamester. These maps are black and white, but detailed. There’s no index, but it really isn’t needed, since the table of contents covers all the big entries. However, an index might have been helpful to find specific treasures and/or encounters.

Digging In

Reading through the table of contents, you notice an imbalance of maps and encounters. Although there are about 75 maps spread across levels 2-21, there are very few low-level maps. I happen to like lower-level games; the balance of survival and heroism to me is more entertaining than power-blasting your way through every encounter. Continue reading →

07/18/15

Why I Love Diplomacy

The venerable classic timelessly soldiers on.

by Brant Guillory

The original Diplomacy board game has a huge following, even among non-wargamers, despite being sold as a wargamer for its thirty-year lifespan. Why?

Well, it’s a wargame that abstracts battlefield prowess to the point that it’s almost irrelevant. Tactical ability is nothing – I repeat, nothing – in this game. It matters not how well you can anticipate the moment for the cavalry charge, plan the artillery bombardment, or outflank your enemy with your panzer corps. In this game, all armies, and generals, are created equal, and numerical superiority is the only relevant statistic.

In fact, the only ability of note is your ability to successfully negotiate your way through the intrigue of the game as the leader of a country. In this respect, Diplomacy has succeeded, and continues to succeed, in a class all it’s own.

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06/17/15

Classic Simulations: Jane’s AH-64D Longbow

Andy takes a look at one of the most influential attack helicopter simulations in PC gaming history

Andy Mills, 17 June 2015

Those were the days

A boxshot of the original Jane’s AH-64D Longbow
A boxshot of the original Jane’s AH-64D Longbow

Back in 1996 the competition for air supremacy in the attack helicopter sim market was intense. Publishers like Domark, Digital Integration and EA/Jane’s Information Group were all homing in on gunship simulations for the PC. Digital Integration had already released AH-64 Apache and was in the process of finishing up HIND for release in 1997. Unfortunately, Domark’s title, Flying Nightmare’s 2, never saw the light of day, leaving EA/Jane’s AH-64D Longbow as the most significant rotary-wing sim release of 1996. Longbow did not disappoint. Built on the solid heritage of the Gunship franchise, Longbow became the benchmark by which all other helo sims would be judged for many years to come.

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05/29/15

Classic Reviews:
Aria – Canticle of the Monomyth Book II (Worlds)

Brant Guillory, 29 May 2015

An RPG book you could show off on an academic bookshelf.  But what’s the payoff?

click images to enlarge

archive-Aria-74
The front cover is gorgeous.

Digging through my boxes of game books (if you ever want to know exactly how much game stuff you really have, pack up and move a few times) I found this old treasure.

I can remember when I bought it – it looked like what all of us gamers had been holding our breath for all these years: A serious intellectual take on role-playing, which addressed an adult audience in an adult fashion.

It succeeded on that level.

Aria Worlds addressed world design from the ground up, and you could do it in any one of a dozen different ways. You could first design the planet and the ecology and build up from there; adventurers expanding their world through their travels could start small and get bigger as they went; you could even (very easily) pick an historical period and adapt it to game term (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.)

The book did not address much beyond the initial age of gunpowder. It was intended as a fantasy game supplement. And it did this very well. Continue reading →