Lords & Wizards (1977)

From the box: "Mighty, magical holocausts, awe-inspiring Dragons, weird and terrible monsters, military battles on a grand scale. Which of the combatants, Order or Chaos, shall win? And can the forces of Neutrality maintain the precarious balance of power . . . An exciting, fast moving game of movement and combat in a fantastic world, where skill and strategy will decide the winner."

From the Introduction: "It is a game of two to six players, each player being represented by a leader in the game. Players must decide before the game starts whether to be a Lord or Wizard. In addition, a player must also decide whether his leader is to follow Order, Neutrality, or Chaos. These three alignments determine the type of leader, and what that leader can do during the game."

From the Designer's Notes: "Lords and Wizards is not just a game; it's an experience. There is nothing quite like the feeling of outwitting an opponent on the field of battle, or in setting up grand alliances, or in stabbing allies in the back, or in discovering lost legends, or in dealing with rebellions, or in avoiding the plague, or in being confounded by the weather, or in.well, you see what I mean."

Components: 72 page 8.5x11" rulebook, 800 die-cut counters, 28x22" map sheet, 4 cardstock game cards, six-sided die, color FGU catalog folder, FGU order sheet.

Hi, Adam Gruen here. I designed this game when I was 16 years old. I'm 51 now, so I have a little bit better perspective on what it *should* have been. But the game has to be understood in its own historical context.

Its origin, of all things, was a fusion of two old SPI game systems. The titles escape me at the moment, they will come to me, I'll edit them in later. One game system featured geomorphic maps that could be folded every which way but loose in order to provide a near-infinite number of possible maps. This was the basis of the Lords & Wizards gameboard. Strategy One, I think it was called. The other SPI game was a tactical simulation of ancient & medieval warfare. Utterly terrible, but it had nice pieces. What I did, quite simply, was create a game system with my friends in which we used the pieces of one game on the map of the other.

Overlaid upon this, was a vague knowledge of types of fantasy troops as mentioned in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, e.g. Ents, Trolls, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, Dragons. (No hobbits?)

Now, this was fundamentally all wrong. For starters, medieval period warfare should not be hex-and-combat results table. It should be all about leadership and morale and maybe supply, and the game map should be point-to-point. If I had to do it over again, I would have done it completely differently.

Also, the game itself suffered from inadequate playtesting. Which was partly a function of the asymmetry of effects for those darned random luck element counters. I think there were some magic items, that could be found, that were too powerful. And too trivial. In some respects it was a precursor to something like the Futuristic Weapons Table from Axis & Allies, in which a player could spend some god-awful amount of game resources to develop a stinker like Super Submarines, hoping instead for Heavy Bombers. Bad game designer, bad!

But anyway. Aside from the questionable graphics, cheap counters, and bizarre game system, keep in mind, it was designed by a kid! It wasn't half bad.