Well, thanks to the wonder of ebay, I’ve recently picked up three old Avalon Hill games.
Magic Realm I’ve already talked about a bit; it’s a fantasy adventure game which is especially deadly. Really, really deadly. Each characters has monsters they can take on with moderate safety once they know the rules – and a lot easier once they have friends with them – but then there are monsters that will just tear them apart. We’ve played a few games of this, enough to get the natives which we can hire into the game, but gaming has been somewhat disrupted lately and we haven’t gotten back to it.
Kingmaker is the classic War of the Roses game from AH. Personally, I feel it has a number of flaws, but I have a couple of friends and contacts who really love it, and it’s a game that gets discussed from time to time, so when I was able to get a copy for a reasonable price, I took the opportunity to do so.
Civilization is probably the most exciting game I’ve just picked up. I played it once or twice when I was at university, but never that much. It’s a fascinating (long) game that has an element of Settlers of Catan in it: you need to gain sets of trading cards to really gain an advantage, and so you trade with other players to do so. However, some of the cards are calamities that only affect the person you trade them to… allowing some bluffing and rather shady deals.
Apart from that, you can have wars (generally not a good idea), expand and exploit the region about you, build cities and discover civilization improvements. Recommended with 4-6 and best with 7, I dare say we’ll end up playing a couple of non-recommended games to get the rules down… and rather shorter games as well. 6+ hours for a full game? Sounds fun, if exhausting!
The copy I got is old. Really old – the plastic bank coin bags that the pieces were in were disintegrating! After rebagging and counting the pieces, I’m missing two: a couple of city tokens from two civs. This is inconsequential – it’ll be easy to proxy them. (It’s a AH first edition from 1981, although the game was published first in 1980 by Hartland Trefoil).
That leaves three old AH games I’m keeping my eye out for, although none of them is really a priority: Merchant of Venus, Up Front and Outdoor Survival. I’ve got a feeling with Up Front that I might end up making my own copy; certainly I have enough cards and sleeves to make it possible.
1830 is the other classic AH game I rather want at present, but as it will be reprinted this year, not much need to go looking online for it!
Kingmaker, the game that has no end. Literally, the rules were printed without Victory Conditions. You really can’t win the game. A lot of people have *said* they finished a game, but I think they are all lying. Still, it’s a fun game.
Civilization is my favorite game of all. I play it every convention I attend. Mainly because I can’t get my friends to play an 8 hour game. Still love it, though.