Mike continues his run through the decades in hobby gaming. This time get out the bell bottoms and spin that disco ball.
Date: Thursday, March 03, 2011
Author: Michael Barnes
8. Dungeon! (TSR, 1975)
Dungeon! is another title that I’ve written about here at Cracked LCD in one of my “Games From the Crypt” postmortems. It’s an important game for me because it’s the first hobbyist board game I ever had as a kid, and I can still vividly remember buying the game on a trip to a timeshare in Hilton Head, South Carolina. My parents and some family friends went together, and I played it with the other kids. It really had an impact on me because it was my first exposure to what was really a sort of stripped-down Dungeons and Dragons. The earlier editions had those classic, weird D&D monsters like Black Puddings and Rust Monsters, later editions updated everything so that the old Superhero class was no more. I believe that Flennetar the Paladin and Floid the Barbarian have remained constant through each reissue. Dungeon! is a game that those coming more recently into the hobby may not fully appreciate, particularly with the newer D&D games like Wrath of Ashardalon available, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this was one of only a few dungeoncrawl board games available. Despite its simplicity (some would call it stupidity), it remains one of my favorite games.
9. Crude: The Oil Game (St. Laurent Games, 1974)
Most folks that know of this game know if through a sort of “professional” bootleg of it that German company Hexagames made in the late 80s called McMulti. But it was originally released many, many years ahead of its time, because it is in many ways one of the spiritual forbearer to the Eurogames movement, and Settlers of Catan in particular. Crude (or McMulti, if you insist) is a game about prospecting, speculating, and refining in the oil and gas industry. Each player oversees a gridded patch of land. Dice are rolled for the X and Y coordinates to determine what parcels can be activated. This might cause a drilling rig, well, refinery, or gas station to produce. That’s the heart of the game, and it isn’t hard to see on a high level where it influenced Settlers, but there is also a crazy market to which players sell their oil and refined gas. On top of that, there are economic condition cards that affect the market so it’s very volatile so buying low and selling high are sometimes not surefire propositions. Crude is an extremely cool, fun-to-play economic game that has some buggy elements but hey, it came out before a lot of today’s gamers were born. Stronghold Games, who just did an amazing job with the Survive reprint, have this slated for a late 2011 official reprint with the original designer on board.
10. Awful Green Things From Outer Space (TSR, 1979)
And finally, here’s another game with a 2011 scheduled reprint. Tom Wham’s Awful Green Things from Outer Space is a brilliant two-player asymmetrical science fiction game with its tongue firmly in cheek. A bunch of silly aliens on a spaceship stop off on a planet and bring on board an alien egg that hatches and the contents run amuck. Sound familiar? But Ripley was only dealing with one Xeno (at least in the first picture). The titular Awful Green Things have the ability to multiply. So it’s up to the crew to try to stop them from simply overwhelming the ship in pure numbers. There are plenty of weapons available to the Znutar’s crew, but their exact effect on the Things is unknown. A random chit is drawn to determine the actual effect- which might be damage, or it might be to cause its target to fragment…and create more Awful Green Things. There is a lot of fun detail in the game, like how the Things have a distinct lifecycle to go along with their biological imperative to reproduce. There have been several editions of this game, some of which included some expansion materials, and the upcoming reprint from Steve Jackson will hopefully be the definitive release.
Next time, cue up a Duran Duran record and pop open a New Coke because I’ll be culling the golden age of hobby gaming, the 1980s, for 10 more of Barnes’ best.
