I had never heard of LINEAGE II: THE CHAOTIC CHRONICLE before I played the board game based on it. I had no idea there was a LINEAGE I or the fact that the game was the most popular MMO in its native South Korea and is the most popular MMO not named World of WarCraft. (Michael Banes: MMO expert! – ed) I have no idea how faithfully the game reproduces the struggles of the Dark Elves in terms of gameplay or how well it portrays whatever JRPG-influenced fantasy kingdom it is supposed to represent. I couldn’t tell you if you would like the game or not if you’re a fan of its source material, because as far as I’m concerned it could be any fantasy setting. But what I can tell you is that LINEAGE II is one of my absolute favorite board games, an almost ridiculously brilliant design that plays out like a gloriously super-streamlined mash-up of TALISMAN and COSMIC ENCOUNTER with some OGRE BATTLE thrown in for good measure. It’s that good.

I played LINEAGE II for the first time when Frank Branham, renowned authority on obscure games, brought a copy into Atlanta Game Factory to play sometime in 2005. It blew me away then with its uncanny mixture of simplicity with epic-scale concepts. Being gentlemen of exceedingly discerning taste and nutso fanboys of cracked-out weirdness, Frank and I loved it even though the other three guys we were playing with were indifferent. I think they were more the AGE OF STEAM number-crunching kinds of folks. After dusting off my copy a couple of weekends ago for a couple of games, I realized that I can remain silent about this neglected masterpiece no longer. I feel like it is my duty to tell the world, or at least the readership of Cracked LCD, that this is the best game you’ve probably never played. There’s one major online retailer that still has copies, quit reading now and go buy it. Come back and finish the article later and then I hope you’ll join my crusade to spread the word about it.

LINEAGE II must be played.

The time seems right to evangelize the glories of LINEAGE II because lately I’ve been kind of burned out on certain design tropes and general sense of ennui that has settled over the hobby. I’ve commented in this very space how the world needs no more TALISMAN clones or “500 plastic soldiers on a map” games. But LINEAGE II is anything but the same-old-same-old; it plays fast and loose with some of the standard design ideas in Ameritrash-style games but it cuts out all of the fat, fluff, and excess. It doesn’t need a million lines of flavor text to tell its story and it depicts mass battles without scores of rules.

It is practically a compendium of Eurogamer complaints- alongside the wantonly irresponsible encouragement of kingmaking and a huge impetus placed on leader bashing, the game even dares to incorporate a roll-and-move mechanic, a closed-fist blind bidding thing, and an outrageously chaotic combat resolution system without batting an eyelash toward any of the design going on in Europe these days. Yet somehow, it pares down huge design ideas and combines wildly different scales and types of games into a cohesive whole without losing theme, narrative, or strong player interaction.

Players represent one of the fantasy races present in the MMO. They’re pretty standard stuff- human, dwarf, elf, blah blah blah. They’re all also exactly the same so no player powers or any funny business like that. Each player has a card for their character that has equipment slots (typical “no shield with a two-handed weapon” stuff) and places to stick various tokens. You start out with a couple of bucks and a handful of mercenaries but we’ll get to them in a second. The turn is pretty simple: you roll a D8 and move that many spaces- clockwise only- around a circular track. After you move, chances are you’ve landed on a monster hunting ground. If that’s the case, you have a choice of fighting one of three different face-up monsters, ranked A, B, and C in descending difficulty. You can man-up and go after the harder creatures but at a greater risk. Or you can grind a little and hit the cheap monsters until you get some gear. Either way, you know what monster you’re fighting up front and what the stakes are.

Combat is resolved by rolling five special dice marked with colored dots, stars (wild), and X’s (misses). All you have to do to win is match up the colored dots on the monster with your roll. Of course, if a monster needs five red dots that’s a pretty tough challenge. The good news is that when you off a creature you flip over its card and it usually gives you money, a potion, or a piece of equipment. Armor gives you re-rolls, weapons give you automatic dots that you don’t have to roll for. It’s a simple system that is absolutely just right for the game—it’s much more interesting than “roll the higher number, add bonuses” like we usually see in this kind of game.

So that’s pretty much the TALISMAN half of the game. Like I stated, it’s very streamlined. No PVP, no encounters other than monsters, and there’s not even player death; the monsters just eat your money. Sounds dumb, but it’s awfully funny when you get robbed by a bear. There’s a couple of special spaces like a temple that gives you ten dollars (I thought they worked the other way), a monster race where you roll a die and bet money (no Chocobos involved), and a few towns where you can pick up an action card. Cards might be standard action card fare or they may be quests that give you victory points for doing certain things like collecting a number of a certain class of monster or kinds of equipment. While in town you can also recruit mercenaries for three dollars apiece. That’s all money is good for, really—to build an army.

So why in the hell would you need an army in a TALISMAN-style adventure game? Because the character-adventure part is just a piece of the action. You might get a couple of victory points by fulfilling a quest or two but you’ll never get to ten and win the game that way. Inside the outer movement track is an area containing a few spaces and three castles. Once a player enters this central area, movement is unrestricted although the player still has to move their full roll. If a player lucks up and lands on a castle, they get to stick a free mercenary on it and claim it. Each turn, the castle gets a prestige point and the player gets money equal to the number of prestige points on it. When it hits seven, it resets and produces a victory point for the currently owning player. So having a castle is pretty much essential to winning the game—get a second or even a third and you’ll be crowned LINEAGE II king or whatever in no time.

Of course, everybody wants a castle. So when a rival player rolls the die and lands on one, a siege commences. This is where the game just flies off the rails and defies all expectations, because unlike any other TALISMAN-style adventure game, the scale changes dramatically. Every player that has a retinue of mercenaries must participate in the battle. The attacker and the defender each plead their case, offering money, equipment, empty promises, threats, and conditional oaths of fealty to try to persuade the other players to join their cause. Each player then secretly selects an “Attack” or “Defense” card to announce who they are supporting. Then- and here’s the disguised auction part- each player secretly selects a number of mercenaries to contribute to their selected side. They can send one. They can send none. Or they can send ‘em all in for maximum slaughterama. Whoever sends the most has a better shot at getting extra spoils if their side wins. Even though only the actual attacker or defender gets possession of the castle, everybody has to ante up a victory point and everybody on the winning team gets to split those put up by the losers as well as getting one from the bank. So there’s definitely an incentive to participate and pick your fights well.