Acbosgd.867 net.games utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark Sat Dec 26 18:02:31 1981 review of "Dark Tower" This newsgroup seems like a good place to review new electronic games, and I'm kicking it off with one such review. If the rest of you think it's a good idea, other reviews are invited (various Atari/Intellivision/?? reviews are obvious things to review.) Having just finished two days of nearly solid playing of the new electronic "Dark Tower" board game, I thought the readers of this newsgroup might be interested in a review. (After all, it costs $45 or so - rather expensive for a one game toy.) Dark Tower is the game advertised by Orson Welles. It seems a bit like D&D at first, but it doesn't seem to be based on D&D at all. Vaguely similar idea, however. You and up to 3 other people (it is possible to have a 1 player game ala rogue) move around the board once, then attack the tower in the middle. Winner is first person to conquer the tower. Features of the game include keeping track of how many warriors you have, how much gold, and how much food. There are tombs and ruins you can inspect to find treasure (usually defended by "brigands" - bands of bad guys) and a bazaar you can buy stuff at. (Haggling over the price is possible.) Along the way you can be hit by a plague, get lost, be attacked by the dragon, or cursed by another player's wizard. There are remedies for all the bad things that can happen except being cursed. If you are really down and out, you can go by the Salvation Army and they will fix you up. (The game calls this "sanctuary", but I like SA better.) After you make it around the board you have to stock up on warriors, solve the riddle of the keys (you guess which permtation of the 3 keys the computer has in mind) and then attack the tower. If the tower beats you, you have to regroup and try again, if you beat it before any other player, you win. All of the game is played above ground, and the other players (whom you are competing against) can see where you go. But the tower contains a microprocessor (TI something or other) and you get a control panel which only you can see to talk to the computer with. The tower plays various tunes and from the beeps you can pretty well tell what's happening to the other players anyway. Overall comments. The game is comparable in complexity and excitement to rogue. One four player game seems to take about 2-3 hours. I found it very enjoyable, so did the others I played it with. It's not hard to get 4 people to play it, but any number from 1-4 can play. (If you have only one player, if you lose all your warriors you lose the tame. In a multi player game, it always lets you keep one warrior so you can keep playing.) One major difference from rogue - rogue is very hard to win at, this game is very easy to win. Almost always, the first person to attack the tower wins the battle. The reason for this is the way it does battle (your n warriors vs the enemies m brigands). It usually chooses m to be roughly equal to n, except that the number in the tower is fixed for the game. A battle is a number of skirmishes, each of which either you win or lose. If you win, the number of brigands is cut in half (divisions are always truncated). If you lose a skirmish, you only lose one warrior. The side with the more warriors usually wins a skirmish, so all you have to do is win one skirmish and you have usually won the battle (since you now outnumber the brigands 2 to 1). This property is even more clear attacking the tower, since you tend to have more warriors and brigands involved, you get that many more chances to win. My biggest complaints are about the packaging around the processor. The game is made of cheap cardboard except for the plastic tower, and the cardboard makes life tougher (you get a cardboard pegboard to keep track of your possessions, which you cannot conceal from your opponents, for example). The computer does not keep track of everything. You move on the cardboard and only tell the computer what kind of square you landed on - it has no idea which exact square you are on. You can also be awarded a "pegasus" which is a cardboard token that allows you to fly anywhere on one turn, rather than taking the usual long path to get there. The computer does not keep track of pegasus tokens, which leads to some funny rules in the game. The whole pegasus notion is a kludge. It has a menu style keypad for input. We found the keypad not as sensetive as we would have liked. You have to hold the tower from behind to be able to push hard enough to register without pushing over the tower. (We finally figured out that pressing buttons with your fingernail works fairly well.) The instructions also are not detailed enough. Although they go to a great deal of trouble to teach you the (rather complex) rules of the game, including a sample game and a training mode in the computer to teach you how to use the bazaar and solve the riddle, they don't answer simple questions like whether two or more persons or other such objects can be on the same space. Also, we thought our unit was broken because when you powered it on it flunked the self test (it just kept spinning instead of starting a game). It turned out that after 4 games on heavy duty (non-alkaline) batteries it needed new batteries. The instructions didn't list this as a typical symptom of bad batteries and the lights were plenty bright. I suspect I will grow tired of this game more quickly than Rogue, but you never know. I am expecting someone to implement a UNIX version of this game any time now, for multiple terminals. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.