Upon The Wind

Dark City Games Newest MicroQuest
Sky pirates! Upon The Wind starts simply as do most of Dark City Games' fantasy adventures. You are waking, bound and held on a sky ship manned by pirates. The ship is in some sort of storm and many of the pirates are falling overboard. Once the battered sky ship makes it through the storm, which appears from this side as some sort of portal, you have shed your bonds and can confront the pirate kidnappers.
Once the pirates are dealt with you discover the ship is in need of repair and you are adrift in a very unfamiliar environment. There seems to be no ground beneath, only endless mists. There are floating islands, skisles, above and below you and several other disabled sky ship wrecks. Perhaps the skisles are inhabited? What might be found on the wrecks? Is it possible to return through the portal? I won't spoil the story, but it's easy to imagine the possibilities.
Upon The Wind is a complete fantasy adventure and like all Dark City Games, can be played solo or as a group. It comes with a versatile hex map or display and a sheet of cut-out counters as well as the journal size game booklet itself. The game comes with everything you need to play (except 3 d6s) including a few pages of rules at the back. The rules, called Legends of the Ancient World are very close to those written by Steve Jackson under the collective title The Fantasy Trip. As such, I see the Dark City Games offerings as a welcome continuation of the tradition of the MicroQuest. 

It all started with the excellent Death Test released in 1978 from Metagaming out of Austin, Texas. Death Test was the first MicroQuest and is written for Steve Jackson's Melee and Wizard Microgames under The Fantasy Trip umbrella. My friends and I played this game to death! Like the current Dark City Games products, Death Test comes with a hex map and a sheet of cut-out counters and has a simple set-up. The ruler has this labyrinth under the palace to test potential mercenaries. Death Test is your audition.  Enter and live and you get the job. Death is the price of failure...hence the title.
The Death Test booklet is set up much like other solo adventures with numbered paragraphs. Entering a room prompts setting up the display and playing out the encounter/combat (Death Test is a fightin' experience). The Fantasy Trip rules support tactical decisions and over the many replays, both solo and with friends, I have developed my favorite tactics for each of the encounters (I finally figured out why pole-arms were so popular). Once the battle is won, you receive your reward (if any) and move on to the next paragraph/encounter. At several points there are choices to make and mapping the labyrinth certainly helps. Obviously I think Death Test has good replayability.
Death Test was followed by other MicroQuests put out by Metagaming, most notably Death Test 2 where you discover the ruler has even deeper dungeons to test your mettle. With the demise of Metagaming, both The Fantasy Trip and MicroQuests went out-of-print. However I kept hackin' and slashin' my way through the Death Tests as I still to this day find the game enjoyable. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon Dark City Games. As soon as I downloaded and played their two free solos I knew an old friend had returned.
Grab your halberds and let's enter Death Test (or Dark City Games).