Back in the '70's a company called Metagaming specialized in small, inexpensive wargames of the counter and hex map variety. They also did The Fantasy Trip, which was/is a favorite of mine. There were two published Microgames, Melee and Wizard and later several MicroQuests, of which Death Test 2 is an early example. Advanced booklets and other stuff that made up The Fantasy Trip line of role-play game products would continue to be published until Metagaming closed shop in 1983. It's a 3d6 system written by Steve Jackson who used a lot of the ideas in his GURPS game later when he published under his own company, Steve Jackson Games.
Death Test and Death Test 2 are adventure games written to be played using the Melee/Wizard Microgames and can be run solo or with a group of friends. I recall hours and hours spent playing my original copies back-in-the-day. I recently acquired the above pictured used copy of Death Test 2 which comes in a little box with a PB booklet and some cut apart counters. The Death Test premise is simple, it is a dungeon used to test potential heroes to determine their worthiness to join the king's guard. There is a part 2 because apparently too many "wimps" were getting through the original.
The box art by Pat Hidy gives a pretty good hint at what lies within. An underground environment of adventure where characters encounter a number of challenges including beasties such as the large wolf pictured. The quest is played out on arena maps which are set-up to depict various rooms with encounters. The map is laid out with a hexagonal grid and counters are used to represent all the rest. A 47-page booklet is included which describes each room in order and the encounters which occur. It's a fight-your-way-through dungeon with a few puzzles and surprises. The Fantasy Trip system is highly tactical and makes use of facing and maneuver, distance and cover and gives the player a lot of choices to make rather than just rolling to hit each turn. The tactical nature of the rules gives it more appeal to wargamers than some other fantasy systems. And in Death Test 2 the tactics do matter. As I recall there are ways to greatly improve your chances of success based on the tactics chosen in various encounters.
Having this old favorite in my hands again brings back a flood of memories, one of which is a thought about converting the game to miniatures, perhaps as a convention game. It would be so easy to do. Just collect the appropriate game pieces - monsters, heroes, terrain, etc. and build a 3D arena with some interchangeable pieces to represent the various rooms. Or lay out the whole complex complete with connecting tunnels and everything as I have seen done with other dungeon concepts using various 3D dungeon terrain systems. The appeal here over other published designs is the tactical nature of The Fantasy Trip rules.
Who among us that plays tactical board games hasn't thought about substituting miniatures for the game playing pieces and converting the printed board to 3D tabletop terrain? It has been done with Avalon Hill's popular Squad Leader and PanzerBlitz and many other boardgames over the years. I recently read Empire of Imagination, the biography of Gary Gygax by Michael Witwer. The author sums Gary up as a guy who just liked to play games and wanted to share the games he liked with others. Looking for ways to share the games we like to play is a big part of the hobby...otherwise we play by ourselves! Fortunately there are a few play-aids devoted to solo play.
No comments:
Post a Comment