The real woe and misery of it all though is that THE GOTHIC GAME is so rare it may as well be considered entirely unavailable. I have never seen a copy of it for sale anywhere, and those who do have it probably purchased it sometime in the early 1990s when it was briefly in print. The designer, Robert Wynne-Simmons, claims to have actually designed the game in 1966 and if this is true then it was a pretty groundbreaking design that prefigures some of the same concepts in TALISMAN and other adventure games by nearly twenty years. It is the only game to Mr. Wynne-Simmons’ credit, although it is definitely worth noting that he was the screenwriter for 1970’s BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, a particularly good British horror picture that scared the dickens out of me when I was a kid and I saw it on Elvira’s Movie Macabre. Mr. Wynne-Simmons has also apparently written a stage musical about THE GOTHIC GAME, although I suspect it has never been performed.
I love THE GOTHIC GAME, but I am also enormously predisposed to love it. I am a gothic horror fanatic, and specifically I love English gothic horror. I have a fondness for all things spooky and morbid, and I think anyone so inclined would love this game as much as I do. I love it so much that a couple of years ago Dollar Bill (whom you may remember from the Cracked LCD series “There Will Be Games”) and I contacted Mr. Wynne-Simmons to see about possibly reprinting the game in a new edition with the classic gameplay intact and a modernized version with some new elements included in the box. He was very receptive to the idea, but plans never fully materialized and the initiative was lost. Chances are we would have lost our shirts on it. I’m not sure the polite world of modern boardgaming would have been very receptive of a game that encourages you to kill everyone at the table in the most gruesome ways possible.
Volume One of this series of books does a grand job of introducing gaming to the masses, but offers a lot of familar information for gamers already in the know.
