|
-
Ian Anderson
New Zealand
Wellington
-
Wizard's Quest is a 1979 Avalon Hill game that has been sitting on Peter's shelf for years. He has mentioned it once or twice as a simple dice-battler, but hasn't made any serious effort to get it played. Lately I have been thinking about "dice-battlers" and I found a re-write of the Avalon Hill rules into plain English. So I got it on the table and got Peter and Nigel to play it with me.
Wizard's Quest turns out to be a step sideways from the usual Risk inspired, conquer-the-world, dice battler games. Firstly each player is aiming to be the first to recover their three treasures which the opposing players have put in awkward places on the board. Secondly there are orcs and a dragon which are hostile to everyone (and orcs seem to breed faster than humans!). Thirdly even though armies vary in size and battles can last several rounds of dice throwing, in each round each player only throws one die. Each time they throw the die they calculate what "die-range" to use. If you throw a number in the range (1..N) you kill that many enemy units. Throw a number that is too big and you kill no-one - unless both players throw too high and then they both loose one unit (this final part was a rule we overlooked). Basically N is the number of soldiers or orcs in the army if there less than 4 otherwise N is 4 (though there are modifiers for terrain etc). What may not be immediately obvious is that an army of 2 is about three times as powerful as an army of 1, and an army of 3 is about six times as powerful as an army of 1.
Each round of the game starts with the non-player forces (the orcs, the dragon and the wizard). These act randomly. This is assisted by having the board divided into 6 numbered regions and each region divided into 6 numbered spaces. So two die rolls will identify any space on the board (well not quite as there are 8 castles in addition to the 36 numbered spaces). Orcs fill up empty spaces and castles and breed and then go on the rampage once they reach their maximum army size of 4. The dragon flies around the board eating orcs and humans though once he has eaten humans he stops. The wizard causes peace (which is a mixed blessing) in the region he visits and has a deck of card which are mostly helpful.
The orcs tended to frenzy in my direction, while Peter and Nigel got their first two treasures quite easily (Peter carved his way through my main force to get to one of them). Somehow I managed to get to my second treasure before Nigel got to his third to win the game in about 90 minutes if I remember right. As I eluded to earlier we overlooked one rule.
There are huge amounts of luck due to the non-player forces and the cards. The orcs and dragon can set you back so much that it can take 2 or 3 turns to recover. Hence the game could drag on for a long time if everyone suffered this fate. The quantity of luck can reduce the feeling of skill and reduce the opportunity for long term strategic planning. On the plus side despite the long sequence of actions in a round, the game flows quite smoothly and each battle is quick and simple.
Overall I'd class this as a refreshing, though more random and slightly silly alternative to Nexus Ops as a quick "dice-battler" when you don't have hours to spare on one of the longer games of this type.
(Played on 3 November 2010)
|
|
|
