SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Back in 1978 (when I was 11), the comic 2000AD featured a gigantic board game of Judge Dredd's epic 'Cursed Earth' storyline. The game was carved into sections and serialized over 6 issues. As a player, you led your armoured convoy across a radioactive wasteland, taking vaccines to plague-stricken Mega City 2. It was sprawling, utterly baffling to non-Dredd-fans, took forever to play and had countess fiddly counters and cards. In other words, it was my first experience of 'proper' boardgames. I played it from beginning to end, I think, twice - and one of those times solo. Not much in a gamer's life changes. The board, sectioned like this, seems to make MORE sense than it did when it was all stuck together. Beautifully bonkers. Before this, board games had always featured high on my Christmas lists. The early ones were gimmicky '70s fare. I remember owning them but can't remember actually playing them. Buckaroo always broke. Mouse Trap was more fun to set up than to play. However, Battling Gladiators (with its spinning tops) got a new lease of life when my daughters were little and could unite three generations of the family in whirling combat. It's 'Battling Tops', right? Ah, but there's a board to circuit and you challenge your neighbours or the facing player, so there's a sort of (loose) narrative context for the battles. See how important THEME is? But where did this affection for board games come from? I guess it was TV adverts...
Yes, perhaps it was the adverts! MB's Stay Alive is a game I'd still sit down and play today. Battleship certainly is "a game you can play anywhere" - with a pencil and paper! I think my first true love was Haunted House, where Ghoulish Gertie's ball dropped down the chimney and bashed your hapless explorers, though I can't recall that I actually played it properly, with the cards. I suspect I just enacted 'let's pretend' ghost stories on the 3-D board. It was re-done, I think, in the '80s as Ghost Castle, with better rules and materials. But this was where gaming started for me. Better things were on their way. No, I don't mean Monopoly and Cluedo and all that stuff. I mean Waddington's wonderful Game of Dracula, a game which I would still gladly play today - and solo! - because I spent hours playing it solo as a child. Yeah, Game of Dracula had it all. Special dice with bespoke symbols? - check! Asymmetric play where one player competes against all the rest? - check! Separate movement tracks for the villain - check and check! The castle itself is a delightful maze, with Dracula sweeping through the rooms on his own trail of blood. There are hidey-holes to use, because if Drac ends up in your room he gathers you into the folds of his cloak and takes you back to his crypt where you now become... the Green Vampire.
Go on, look at the board. See that big white room in the middle? That's the quickest way to the exit ... but look how often Drac criss-crosses through it - and there are no hidey-holes or candlesticks. Better to creep round through the small rooms to get the the exits at the top. Jeez, I want to play this game again right now! Theme and narrative also scored big with Abandon Ship (a game pointlessly rebranded as Sinking of the Titanic in the USA). Look - the ship actually sinks and comes up as the rescue ship.
So here's a new thing: this game has a sort of victory engine, because you need to collect passengers, food and water (with proper resource tokens), so there are trade-offs to make between getting these on the ship (but losing everything if you're on board when the waters cover you) or taking your chances on the islands. This game was another I loved to play solo. As the '70s drew to a close, the components in games were improving: nice moulded plastic pieces, bright sturdy boards, quality cards and tokens. Lots of older family board games got makeovers. But I was getting critical of unimaginative rules. Buccaneer (in fact, a game from the 1930s) had adorable components (amazing gems, gold bars and rum barrels to fit in cute plastic pirate ships) and introduced me to pick-up-and-deliver mechanics, but was dull to play. Spy Ring (originally from the '60s) had fantastic fedora-hatted spies and bald thuggish bodyguards snooping around a beautiful city, but the clever mirrors and microchips gimmick couldn't disguise the tedious collect-the-set gameplay. Look at those awesome resources for Buccaneer (left and centre) - worth salvaging for newer games, don't you think? And how charming are Spy Ring's board and pieces? Shame about how it plays. However, one game of this vintage stands out for the sheer elegance of its rules design and this is Formula One. This racing circuit game has a tight theme and clever dashboards that let you dial your speed up or down (you move one space for each 20mph of speed) and track the wear and tear to your brakes when you slow for corners or tyres when you corner too fast. There are dice, but you only roll them to determine your penalties when cornering. The rest of the game is pure choice: slow down for safe cornering or risk spinning off? pull in for pit stops to fix those brakes and tyres or push your luck and take another lap to increase your lead? In 2004, the Telegraph called Formula One "the prince of all board games" and it has been praised by other reviewers over the years: Waddington's Formula 1 is, arguably, the benchmark against which all other motor racing board games must be measured. The reason is simple: skill is the predominant factor, while luck plays a just big enough part that the outcome is not entirely certain - Dave Budd I see that Formula One is finally out of print, but similar racing games (like Formula Dé) have replaced it and the grognards on BGG keep the original game alive by posting up designs for new circuits. Of course, all these board games were about to be swept into the attic by the arrival of powerful new forces in my life: D&D would replace the competitive board game and, when board games returned to the table in the 1980s, it would be Hero Quest and Talisman. The age of the modern boardgame had dawned.
Not all adverts are inspiring. What exactly is a "browdsowd"? Let Bardic Broadcast's cracking review explain it to you. Seriously, this is hilarious. One of the delightful features of life in the 21st century is that boardgames are very much back and feature once again on my Christmas lists. The new 'microgames' and deck games like Keyforge make great gifts (take note if you are reading this, O my Daughters!) and connect Christmas morning right back to the Christmasses child-me used to enjoy when the wrapping came off Game of Dracula or Abandon Ship. But I learned other things from those old '70s board games too. Important life lessons for the adult gamer:
Next blog will be in 2019!!! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all gamers.
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