As I have no doubt mentioned, I am a fan of the Star Fleet Battles board/wargame. Now, this is a game with a lot of rules. The “master rulebook” runs over 400 pages, and a second master rulebook covering a different quadrant of the galaxy recently came out at an additional 340 pages. While it’s a very fun game, those rules do not make for a riveting read-through (not that that’s stopped me, of course). But every now and then you hit something quirky in the midst of all the rules legalese that makes you grin.

For example, here’s one of my favorite little rules in the entire game. It’s something that will probably never happen in a typical game. It describes what happens when a starship captained by a “legendary captain” (think Kirk or Picard) is destroyed:

[G22.223] If his ship is destroyed, he has a 1% chance of doing something that results in his being aboard and in control of the nearest enemy ship of the same or smaller size class…. All legendary officers and remaining crew arrive with him. (Don’t ask how he did it; that’s what legends are made of!)

I assume that rule is inspired by Star Trek III, which features Kirk self-destructing the Enterprise yet shortly thereafter taking control of the Klingon Bird-of-prey through various bits of trickery. Who could forget this classic scene (thank you imdb):

Torg: [the Klingons have boarded the Enterprise only to find it is deserted] My Lord, the ship appears to be deserted.
Kruge: How can that be? They’re hiding.
Torg: Yes, sir. The ship appears to be run by computer. It is the only thing that is speaking.
Kruge: Speaking? Let me hear it.
Enterprise computer: [Torg walks over to a console, placing his communicator towards it] 9-8-7-6-5…
Kruge: [shouts] Get out! Get out of there! Get out!
Enterprise computer: 2-1…
[the Enterprise bridge explodes]

Other fun rules cover similarly rare but cool game events, like crew mutiny on Klingon ships whose security officers have been killed (in the game universe, Klingon ships are crewed largely by slaves) and what happens when you tractor an enemy ship and then drag it at high speed into a planet. They’re situations that rarely if ever come up in your average game—but you know that when they do, they fuel Gamer Stories for years to come.

Today I want to reminisce about one of the games from the very earliest strata of that gaming pile–a curious and nearly-forgotten boardgame with which I was obsessed throughout junior high, and which eventually served as an entrypoint for me to the world of roleplaying games. The game is The Fellowship of the Ring, published in 1983 by Iron Crown Enterprises, and–like some of the Iron Crown RPGs I would later play–I loved it, although I didn’t always completely understand it.

Fellowship is a two-player strategy boardgame that aims to simulate the events of the first half of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Physically, the game consists of a gorgeous hex-map of Middle-Earth (on solid cardboard, in six pieces that fit together), a whole bunch of colored dice (used as playing pieces rather than rolled, interestingly), a few small informational chits, and a huge number of cards (on rather thin cardstock; you have to punch them out before play) representing about every character and creature ever referenced by Tolkien. The production values are fairly impressive overall. (The map, like most of ICE’s Tolkien mapwork, is really nice; and I believe some of the character artwork cropped up in later MERP RPG books.)

The basic gameplay consists of the Fellowhip (good) player trying to move the Ring as close to Mordor as possible, while avoiding evil agents and keeping the Enemy player in the dark as to the Ring’s actual whereabouts. The Sauron (evil) player uses his agents (Nazgul, monsters, and a slew of orcs, assassins, etc.) to locate and then take the Ring for himself. The game ends when the turn limit is reached, or when the Fellowship player declares the dissolution of the Fellowship, at which point a victor is determined by checking how close (and how quickly) the Fellowship player got to Mordor.

It’s a complicated game–and it seemed doubly complicated to me, given that Monopoly was the most complex game I was playing at the time I learned about Fellowship. Each of the dozens of characters and creatures in Fellowship has its own card with roleplaying-style stats (fighting power, defensive power, health points, etc.), and each player can have a fairly large number of units moving independently across the map during a typical turn. The Fellowship player can split his forces into numerous groups to keep the Enemy player from knowing for sure which one has the Ring; and he can also create “rumors”–fake groups that look like real ones to the Enemy player–to further deceive his opponent. The Enemy player, in turn, can send special agents like the Nazgul in pursuit of the Fellowship player’s various groups, and can flag one or more areas of the map each turn as the target of a thorough search, increasing the odds that any Fellowship groups in the area will be exposed and attacked.

If a Fellowship group is exposed by an Enemy search, it is attacked, either by specific Enemy creatures in the area or by randomly-drawn monsters depending on the terrain (orcs, trolls, spiders, etc.). A very RPG-style combat then ensues, with each player laying out his battle line (not unlike a Magic: the Gathering duel, actually) and attacking targets on the other side. Characters can be wounded, poisoned, or killed. The Fellowship player can usually deal rather easily with generic orcs and monsters, but if the Enemy player can keep dragging the Fellowship’s finite number of characters into combat with his limitless pool of monsters, he can wear down the Fellowship characters and eventually determine who has the Ring.

Overall, it’s a very clever game, and gameplay can be quite strategic and intricate. The Fellowship player is playing an elaborate bluffing game, trying to goad the Enemy into focusing on groups that aren’t carrying the Ring. He could send the Ringbearer’s group straight toward Rivendell and down towards Mordor, as in the books; that route lets him meet up with a lot of the trilogy’s most powerful good characters, but is also the route the Enemy will be watching the closest. Perhaps he should send a few “fake” groups towards along the direct route to Mordor, while the real Ringbearer takes a circuitous route southwest along the coast? Or maybe sneak the Ring across the mountainous northern edge of Middle-Earth, steering well clear of the more obvious routes? If the Fellowship player is smart, he’ll have groups heading in every possible direction, forcing the Enemy player to make hard choices about where to concentrate his searches.

The Enemy player, on the other hand, has a huge advantage in terms of manpower, and has some truly scary monsters (the Balrog, dragons, the Watcher in the Water, etc.) he can use to guard important chokepoints on the map. He’ll win eventually if he can bog the Fellowship player down with repeated combats, and once he correctly guesses where the Ring is, he can focus a lot of nastiness on the Ringbearer’s group. His main disadvantages are that he can’t focus on all of the Fellowship groups at once, and must waste precious time exposing and eliminating the “fake” groups. And even when he manages to expose a Fellowship group, he can’t always control which of his forces are on the scene to attack.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay can be fairly deep and rewarding, the game rules are quite complicated–more complicated, I think, than they really need to be. The hit points of individual characters must be carefully tracked. Weather must be checked each turn. The mode of transit (horse, on foot, flying, etc.) must be determined for each group–and there can be a lot of groups on the board at one time. Some of the rules are just plain confusing, and I had to houserule more than one perplexing situation that cropped up during gameplay. Combat plays out much like it does in the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game, which is fun if you’re a veteran RPGer, but not so much if you are looking for a fast and exciting battle. It’s clear that the game was designed by people who played a lot of RPGs, and that doesn’t always translate into a fluid or fast-paced boardgame experience. (As it happened, Fellowship was what indirectly brought me into the roleplaying hobby. One of the first RPG products I bought, MERP: Riders of Rohan, I purchased because I mistakenly thought it was an add-on for the Fellowship boardgame.)

One final drawback: the game’s end-point, the dissolution of the Fellowship, feels a bit anti-climactic. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have a good way of incorporating armies or epic battles (high points throughout Tolkien’s trilogy) into gameplay, and a Tolkien game without Helm’s Deep, Minas Tirith, and other epic battles feels like it’s missing something. Granted, the game sets out only to simulate the first book in The Lord of the Rings, but it feels like it could’ve done a bit more.

All in all, I would say that the game’s downsides are largely offset by its good points. The most appealing feature of the game is that you can try out alternate routes for the Fellowship to take to Mordor–and with all the monsters, encounters, and interesting characters that can come into play, the game at its best feels like you’re writing your own version of The Lord of the Rings. That’s fun, even if it is a gameplay idea that would be better served by a simpler set of rules. Despite its flaws, this is a truly unique boardgame, existing somewhere in the nebulous realm between roleplaying games and wargames. With the current state of the Tolkien license, I doubt this game will ever again see the light of day–but should you happen across a used copy somewhere, it’s certainly worth a look. It’s been gathering dust for years in my closet, but I look forward to breaking it out some rainy afternoon with a group of fellow Tolkien fans and rewriting the story of The Fellowship of the Ring.

I haven’t played Monopoly–or any other “normal” boardgames–in a long while. (“Normal” here meaning “can be purchased in a mainstream toy store.”) I do believe, however, that there is a copy of Star Wars Monopoly in the closet (next to Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, of course). Suddenly I’m in the mood for some capitalistic excess.

Ever heard of Dwarfstar Games? I hadn’t either, but it turns out they released eight rather quirky little strategy games in the early 1980s, all most of which are now available for free download. Most of them look like fairly short and straightforward strategy games, with an obvious wargame influence–the hexgrid maps and cardboard chits are a dead giveaway.

Downloading digital scans of the game maps and playing pieces isn’t quite as cool as actually owning the physical thing, of course, but for $10 or so at your local copy shop, you could probably recreate a fashionably old-school physical copy of the games. Might be a fun change of pace from all those new-fangled, high-production-quality games you kids are playing these days.

(More info and reviews of each game are available here. Spotted at Game It Yourself, which lists many, many other freely downloadable games.)

I really don’t like it when a game makes you “lose a turn” as a gameplay penalty or obstacle.

This realization came to me after I played in several games where being forced to lose a turn was a routine penalty for unlucky dice rolls or falling afoul of other players. Used sparingly, it’s not a big deal to skip a turn every now and then (and in some games it is a logical gameplay element), but in one game I lost four turns in a row due entirely to bad luck–that’s about twenty minutes of sitting and watching other people play the game you showed up to participate in.

So yes, I’m bitter about that experience, but I would prefer that games try to find some other way of penalizing you than basically making you sit in the corner for a turn. An in-game penalty should make winning more difficult; it doesn’t need to take away the fun of actually playing the game. Take away my game tokens, make me go back to Start, lower my score, make me lose a few cards… but please, don’t make me stop playing!

(On a similar note, I’m a big fan of games that make sure that every player gets to “do something,” however minor, during every other player’s turn; even if all you’re doing is drawing a card or rolling a die while the other player takes their turn, it’s more fun than waiting for five minutes for your turn to roll around again. But I’ll save that rant for another day.)

• “Scotty, I need warp speed in two minutes or we’re all dead.”

• “Full. Impulse. Power. Full power, damn you!”
• “Sir… our shields are dropping!” “Raise them!” “I can’t!”
• And, of course, “FIRE!!!” and “KHAAAAAN!!!” (both preferably screamed out loud while you shake your clenched fists)

So, then. Star Fleet Battles. It’s fun.

• The production values are very high. The gameboard is very sturdy and nice-looking, as are most of the components. Most of the pieces are made of thick cardboard.
• As the screenshot above may indicate, there are a lot of playing pieces and cards. It’s a bit overwhelming and bewildering when you’re setting it up for the first time.
• Arkham Horror has some definite RPG-like elements–each investigator has a unique set of vital stats, and you can collect weapons, spells, and other goodies to increase your odds of survival.
• Interestingly, all of the players are on the same team–they aren’t really competing with each other for a single winner. Either you all work together to defeat the Cthulhu Mythos or you all lose. Even in the few turns that Michele and I played, it was clear that a good level of cooperation and assistance between players would be necessary to succeed.
• Turns are structured well so as to minimize the time you need to spend waiting for other players to take their turns. Everybody gets a chance to act on every turn.
• With all of the investigator stats, abilities, items, and game locations, it’s a bit complicated to learn–it was at least 2-3 turns before I really started to “get” how the game worked. However, once you get the hang of it, the game actually seems to move quite quickly.

Those are just initial impressions. I’ll try to remember to report back in more depth once we’ve gotten a full game in. Time will tell how entertaining the game proves to be, but thus far I’m extremely pleased with it. It’s very unique–like a cross between Clue and Dungeon. I think it’s a safe bet that this Halloween, we’ll be hosting an Arkham Horror game night.

• Winning battles is trickier than in FA‘s sister games. In particular, it’s relatively difficult to capture a territory. To do so, you must destroy or rout every defending unit–but because of the way that the combat rules work, that’s tough to do. (Among other things, the defending side gets an advantage in combat. There’s also only one “round” in combat, so you only get one round to take out every defender.) If you want to be sure of a battlefield victory in FA, you pretty much need massive numerical superiority or incredible luck.

• The three invaders start with overwhelming numerical superiority, with large armies in excellent attack positions. In addition, the invaders receive very heavy reinforcements every turn–but only for the first few turns of the game. In other words, the invaders are primed to make very rapid progress in the opening turns of the game… but when those reinforcements stop, they’re stuck with whatever they’ve got for the rest of the game.
• On the other hand, the U.S. starts out in a comparatively awful strategic position–its meager starting forces are spread equally thin across the entire country. It receives comparatively light reinforcements each turn, but (critically) those reinforcements do not stop after the first few turns of the game. Its position is the strategic opposite of the invaders; the U.S. is positioned to lose heavily during the opening rounds of the game, but can count on a slow-but-steady buildup of reinforcements throughout most of the game.
• The effect of this oddly-balanced strategic/logistical situation is that the invaders must “break” the U.S. before its reinforcements reach a critical mass and the initiative starts shifting in America’s favor. Well-planned initial attacks are crucial for the invaders; any major setbacks for them in the opening turns of the game will cost them heavily once their reinforcements dry up and the U.S. finally starts going on the offensive.
• The opening turns are crucial for the U.S. as well; in the face of the invaders’ numerical superiority, the U.S. inevitably loses a great deal of territory early on. The challenge facing the U.S. player is to determine which areas can be sacrificed to the invading hordes, and which areas must be held at all costs. The U.S. player does a lot of retreating during the first few turns–but it must retreat in such a way that a) the invaders are slowed as much as possible, and b) the U.S. will be in a good position to counterattack once its reinforcements build up.
• The eastern invader is the biggest immediate threat to the U.S., because so many U.S. cities are located near or along the East Coast within striking distance of the invaders. Any strategic mistakes by the U.S. in the east/northeast can easily be fatal.
• On the other hand, the western invader poses the least immediate threat to the U.S. The entire west coast usually falls within the first two turns, but after that, the western invaders must laboriously travel across the entire midwest to threaten the important cluster of U.S. cities in the east. This process takes many turns and gives the U.S. time to prepare.
• The game does a good job of simulating an ancient invaders’ dilemma: the homefield advantage. The width of the battlefront only widens the further the invaders advance, and America is big enough that U.S. forces can almost always retreat a bit further out of range. The invaders must progress along a fairly predictable invasion path, whereas the U.S. can often pick and choose where to hit the enemy. American air power based in Omaha (distant from the front lines) can strike at almost any point along any of the invading fronts.

The way the game often plays out, in my experience, is about like this: the invaders come within inches of breaking the U.S. and winning, but run out of gas a mere turn or two from victory. If the U.S. can survive the first six or seven turns, it has a very good chance of winning the game; at that point, the invaders can no longer replace battlefield losses and start to lose the war of attrition. If the invaders haven’t “checkmated” the U.S. by the tenth turn or thereabouts, it’s very tough for them to win the game. That said, it takes a lot of skill for the U.S. to survive through throse hellish first few turns, when it seems that the invaders are simply unstoppable.
In summary, Fortress America is a very fun, but slightly odd, strategy game that merits more attention than it received back in the heyday of such games. If you’re in the area and looking for a good challenge, I’d happily challenge you to a Cold War duel of the superpowers!