Our very final adventures in Dragonfire Castle.

Our very final adventures in Dragonfire Castle.

Before my great 2012 clearout I dusted off DungeonQuest for some final adventures into Dragonfire Castle before calling it a day on this old classic.  Even as a kid, back in the day I always felt there was something missing from DungeonQuest.  It was fun for a quick blast of mostly comedy gaming but meatier dungeon crawl games soon took over and DQ began to gather a thick layer of dust.

I was lucky enough to pick up the Heroes expansion but never managed to track down Catacombs, which looked like the most interesting expansion to be fair.  So we had a host of fodder – sorry, ‘Heroes’ - to choose from for this retro nostalgia adventure, but we decided to stick with the base game Heroes instead.  It had been nearly two decades since I last played and I couldn’t be bothered to read all the individual character rules...

We played a series of two player games and to start off with I chose Volrik, who was always my old favourite.  He just seemed a bit more amiable, and maybe less pretentious somehow.  KG chose the far more pretentious El Adoran.  The game lasted about 20 minutes as I nipped through rooms and chambers making my way steadily towards the treasure chamber and lucking out by bagging a series of corridor tiles.  Eventually my progress was altered and I was sent off course, the tiles forbidding me from ever reaching the dragon’s hoard.  My strange journey took me to the other side of the castle and out of one of the other corner towers.  I killed a goblin and an orc and managed to escape the dungeon with a paltry 230gp and just a few scratches to show for my troubles.  KG took a wrong turn, fired all of his arrows at enemies as quickly as he could, had his HP whittled away, and ended up getting horribly lost.  The doors of Dragonfire Castle slammed shut as night fell and Mr Adoran was forever trapped in the dungeon’s depths.  All hail to Volrik, the King amongst peasants!

Next up I took Sir Rohan of Rohanland whilst KG decided upon the barbaric warrior Ulv, whose name was onomatopoeiac for sick-making sounds.  Which was fairly ironic because he died of throwing up after a centipede poisoned him to bits in an early room.  Were one to ransack his bloated, poisoned corpse - as one is often wont to do in DungeonQuest - it would reveal a meagre 40gp.  Barely even worth the deadly infection you’d invariably contract in the act.  Sir Rohan meanwhile laughed at the distant, weakening screams of his adventuring competitor and as Ulv called for his mummy (Ulva) and painfully expired, Rohan gleefully counted up the 290gp in his pouch, strolled into a room and looked up to stare into the face of a Death Warrior.  Aptly named it were, as it impaled him upon its mighty, spiky sword.  None were to leave Dragonfire Castle that day.

Next into the grinder, and undeterred by the continual murdering of previous adventurers, Vikas and Rohan (Jr presumably) stepped up to the plate.  KG’s Rohan followed in the footsteps of his father and found only death and doom in the dimness of the dungeons.  The 120gp in his pockets was little consolation as Dragonfire’s doors slammed shut and trapped him in the darkness.  Vikas – yours truly btw - meanwhile played total chickenshit and just hung around the entrance way, jumping at noises and staying within eye sight of the exit door.  After finding a gem worth 50gp in an old boot Vikas darted back out the doorway stammering the words, “Screw this!”  It could hardly be called a victory as Vikas was exiled by the local peasants shortly afterwards for being a totally cowardly custard.

Our final two player game saw a penniless Siegfried (myself) step into the dark and get instantly stabbed in the back by a Sneaky Orc.  As he gasped his last, Vikas the coward (played by KG this time) was thrown into another entrance by the angry villagers.  With no recourse but to face his demons he wandered the depths of the horrible, horrible castle and desperately waved his sword around him as goblins and trolls reached for his tasty, tasty flesh.  Screaming like a girl he raced down corridors towards another tower exit.  Finally stumbling upon an abandoned crypt, he ransacked the tombs of the dead and took 370gp’ worth of necklaces and rings from the poor corpses.  Stuffing it all into his jerkin he raced for the exit and escaped, not even considering heading towards the Treasure Chamber and sleeping dragon.  With his haul he’d finally be able to buy a ticket out of this town and away from the abusive accusations of cowardice from the locals...

Thus ended our final adventures in Dragonfire Castle.  Measly victories and gruesome deaths, the universally recognisable hallmarks of any DQ adventure!

Over the next few days, before wrapping it all up for eBay I played a bunch of solo games to see how I’d fare in my super final adventures, and had a series of notable victories, but mostly defeats:

Volrik 3,650gp – 1LP – DIED on last turn at sundown after trying to haul off bags of treasure from the Dragon’s chamber, also forgot to take a Magic Ring along!

Volrik 10gp – 2LP – WON with just 2 turns left after beating both a Death Warrior and a Spider

Volrik 490gp – 2LP – WON with just 3 turns left

Sir Rohan 0gp - 7LP – Turn 10, DIED fell into a bottomless pit to his doom

Ulv 10gp – 2LP – Turn 19, DIED stepped into a Rotating Room which rotated into a wall

El Adoran 4,130gp + rope – 6LP, 0 arrows remaining, Turn 19, DIED used his Transform ring to turn a corridor into a Rotating Room which rotated into a wall

Siegfried 0gp – 0LP – Turn 11, DIED found some Rope, then got killed by a Death Warrior

Vikas 2,910gp + rope – 12LP – DIED Turn 16, Room Rotated into a Bottomless Pit, fell to his doom

Roland 420gp – 0LP – DIED Turn 14, killed by a Sneaky Troll

Farendil 4,000gp – 0LP – DIED Turn 15, killed by a Sneaky Death Warrior

Ironhand 0gp – 14LP – DIED Turn 9, Death by Bottomless Pit

Rildo 2,760gp – 5LP – WON Turn 23, escaped with 1 dagger remaining!

Helena 30gp – 0LP – DIED Turn 11, killed by an Orc

Helena 2,260gp – 1LP – WON Turn 14, made it to the treasure chamber and ran for the win!

And that was the end of that!  I have mixed feelings about letting it go but game space is at a premium in our house now.  And were it not for these final efforts at beasting the heck out of the game DQ might not have seen the light of day for another 20 years.  A great, simple, little game, but very much of its time, and now massively over-shadowed by games like the far superior D&D Adventure System board games.  Plus if I ever feel the need to revisit Dragonfire Castle I can always pick up the updated FFG version of the game (and ignore their awful looking, overly complex combat system).

So long, DungeonQuest – and thanks for the memories!

When it’s time to move on from those old titles you love…

When it’s time to move on from those old titles you love…

Over the years I’ve amassed quite a number of board games that I’ve loved and played to death and that have then gone cupboard- or attic-wards and disappeared into obscurity collecting dust and forgotten memories like weird cardboard time capsules.

A few years ago I had to have a bit of a clean out to make room for our rapidly incoming child and that little purge saw a stack of the old 80s/90s Games Workshop titles hit eBay.  Goodbyes were said to a few notables:

Dark Future – a game I’d bought purely off the back of the Fighting Fantasy game book Freeway Fighter.  I loved the idea of breaking out some old matchbox cars and modding them to make ever more cars to race and blow up.  It was sort of a weird skirmish/race game that like most of those old GW games was massively over-complicated for what it actually delivered.  I also seem to remember that motorbikes were pretty shit because if you were in a car you could just ram them off the road.  Although we might have been playing that one wrong to be fair.  Still, those desert road pieces were pretty cool, as were the little machine gun turrets on the Interceptors.

Blood Bowl + Dungeon Bowl – we played the heck out of this.  I had tons of extra rules and players hacked from the pages of White Dwarf magazines, a hardback manual of Star Players, dungeon tiles with spiked balls and treasure chests and an ongoing league wherein we tried to continually murder each others’ players.  I think it might have ended up being too comical or light for me and my mates at the time though.  We ended up preferring to run around dungeons killing things and nicking their loot rather than tossing a ball at them.

Mighty Empires – I genuinely loved this one actually.  The ‘sweeping conflict’ it promised was all there, we even tried the Warhammer Fantasy Battle version and broke out into armies to resolve skirmishes.  That didn’t last long though – far too much hassle.  So we ended up playing it for what it was, and it was still great fun.  Again, I had a ton of extra bits and pieces for it, necromancer’s towers, sea tiles with pirates and such.  The game always seemed to resolve itself during the winter for us.  As our armies camped down and prepared for the coming weather and hardship we’d all plough our resources into saboteurs and assassins and agents.  I think assassins could literally kill 100s of points’ worth of troops if I recall correctly, so you’d send in a few ninjas and utterly decimate your opponent’s forces.  Come springtime they’d have virtually nothing left to fight back with and you’d win.  If it even lasted that long.  Too fiddly and bitty in the long run – and the pieces didn’t age well, especially compared to the sort of conquering games you can get these days.  FFG’s Runewars or WOTC’s Conquest of Nerath come to mind, though I’ve never played either title I’d like to try them some day.

And now I find myself in a similar position of having to find room once again, especially because of all the gaming acquisitions I’ve made in the meantime.  So this year/week/day it’s goodbye to the following:

Talisman 3^rd edition –  The game is great and all but I have second edition with all the expansions (except Dragon – redonculously over-priced on eBay to the point where I wouldn’t even consider tracking it down) so 3^rd edition, despite the cool board and all the skulls, skulls, SKULLS is just so much wasted cardboard for me.  If I ever consider sticking 2^nd edition on eBay someone here come and slap me upside the head.  Yes, it’s random as all hell, but it’s still my first true love (in a board gaming way).  Well, Talisman and HeroQuest…

DungeonQuest 2^nd edition with Heroes expansion – I suppose FFG has redundantified this old beast now with their fancified new edition with all its lovely new artwork.  Either way I still love the simple “flip a tile - you’re dead” gameplay.  Sadly this has been superseded by the enormously superior D&D Adventure System games, whose cooperative nature and overall production values just outshine DungeonQuest in every way.  As my son grows up and if he chooses to ever play games with me, I’d always choose to play a cooperative dungeoncrawl game instead of this hackfest.  Great memories, particularly of the ninja in the Heroes expansion who I always played and hoped would be good, but who proved to be as useless as every other bugger when it came down to it.  Ninja your way out of a Revolving Door that hits the dungeon wall why don’t you?!

The Sorcerer’s Cave – Thought I’d share the love with this one – I picked it up on eBay originally and played it quite a few times.  It’s great fun, but I redesigned it with updated components so now it’s time for this version to move on and find another home.  I genuinely hope someone gets a kick out of it like I did.  It wouldn’t last a second in today’s competitive market with its simplistic design but you can see how it helped father the genre, and its ultimate goal of providing a cool RPG style story is extremely admirable.  Exactly the same goal in fact that I’ve aspired to attain with Fantasy Quest.  To that end I owe a ton to games like this and Talisman that inspired me through the years.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Game US edition – Picked this up from the US in a desperate bid to get my Buffy-fan wife into board games – it didn’t work.  So now this HeroQuest style Buffy themed curio finds its way onto eBay where hopefully someone will learn to love its unique and unusual mechanics.  This was a very ballsy genre game to make from a really successful TV show and let’s face it, it pees all over the UK Buffy game we got lumped with over here in the UK!  Its theme alone though will ensure it never sees play with my actual mates so off it goes.

Star Wars: Star Warriors – This is one of those great old board games from the 1980s - when they used to make really cool games!   I’m loathe to see it go as I spent a lot of time with this one as a kid.  I even redesigned the rules entirely removing everything Star Wars from the theme and turned it into a sort of intergalactic empire building game.  You had a huge mothership (whichever ship token suited you), which you used to travel through space and conquer planets (asteroids) and fortress installations (gun batteries) whilst trading and meeting with and destroying other players and NPC forces that were also travelling around the board.  You could choose from a bunch of different racial types that gave you various different benefits or meant you traded for different types of supply (the evil races looked for slaves and conquering, the goodies looked to make trade routes and kill the baddies) and the one with the most VPs won.  I still have the rules for all this nonsense somewhere, maybe one day I’ll look at re-implementing it entirely if there’s anything worth salvaging in there.  We ended up playing that version a lot more because you seemed to have a much grander experience in a few hours than merely jinking and rolling your X Wing about until you could zap your mate’s TIE fighter after a few hours!  Still this was a fun game, just never seemed as, I dunno, epic (?) as we’d hoped for compared to how complicated it actually was.

So here's my seller's page in case any of these stories brings a tear to your eye or a tingle in your wallet, you've got a week to cash in  - oh, and they're all up for 99p each!:


http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/ninjadorg/?_trksid=p4340.l2559

Everything must go!!

Sometimes, it's just time to move on, and you've got to make those really hard decisions.  Tune in next week after I bid on my own items to stop them going and then suffer horrific buyer's remorse...