Game 410: Oregon

The Oregon Trail could well be the second most famous game of 1985, at least in the U.S., where it was once ubiquitous to elementary school computers. Students, when allowed their precious few minutes of computer time, would form a wagon train of their friends and enemies, and get them picked off one-by-one by disease, drowning, snakebites, and raider attacks, to name some of the many hazards of 19th century American wilderness, leaving behind a trail of dirty epitaphs. Or just spend the entire session hunting buffalo and squirrels. Either way, little history was learned or appreciated.

It's a pretty well known bit of trivia by now that the iconic 1985 Apple II game was adapted from a much earlier BASIC game, created in 1971 as a high school history lesson by Minneapolis teacher Don Rawitsch. In 1974, he joined MECC, then a state-operated organization, and in 1975, released an updated edition statewide, and then nationwide, quickly becoming MECC's most popular product. Less well known is that 1985 wasn't the first version on Apple II; MECC made and distributed microcomputer ports of their BASIC games as early as 1978, and Oregon was one of the first conversions.

That original 1971 version has been lost to the great bit bucket - deleted from the school computer by summer vacation, and the prospects that Rawitsch's sole paper printout backup survives today are dismal. The best we can do here is the 1975 version, which Digital Antiquarian curates along with a recreation of the "final" 1978 HP-BASIC version.

To play these, rather than emulate an HP-2100 system or have to telnet into a virtual one, I wound up using Tom Nelson's Iowa Basic interpreter. Please note that at the time of this writing, the stable release isn't quite compatible with either version of Oregon; the code used by the timed shooting minigame is unimplemented. I used a test version that includes it, which will become unavailable once the next stable release comes out.

If you want to play the 1975 version this way, you'll need a small code change. This line:

4515  ENTER #P,B2,B1,C$

becomes

4515  ENTER B2,B1,C$

 

THIS PROGRAM SIMULATES A TRIP OVER THE OREGON TRAIL FROM
INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI TO OREGON CITY, OREGON IN 1847.
YOUR FAMILY OF FIVE WILL COVER THE 2000 MILE OREGON TRAIL
IN 5-6 MONTHS --- IF YOU MAKE IT ALIVE.

Being already familiar with the 1985 Apple II version, this BASIC edition is a bit, well, basic. Despite what the description says, your family is mostly unaccounted for here - you don't name them (or yourself), they can't die or get sick, and apart from some mention in random events (e.g. "your son got lost - spend half the day looking for him"), for all intents and purposes you travel alone.

Your first decision is allocating a $700 budget on oxen, food, ammo, clothes, and miscellaneous supplies. 

My choices:

• $300 for oxen. This is the most you can spend, and more is better.
• $50 for food, just so you don't starve to death right at the start.
• $50 for ammo. More than you need.
• $150 for clothing.
• $150 for miscellaneous.

 

MONDAY MARCH 29 1847


TOTAL MILEAGE IS 0
FOOD           BULLETS        CLOTHING       MISC. SUPP.    CASH
 50             2500           150            150            0
DO YOU WANT TO (1) HUNT, OR (2) CONTINUE

Of course I want to hunt!

TYPE BANGbang

SORRY---NO LUCK TODAY
DO YOU WANT TO EAT (1) POORLY  (2) MODERATELY
OR (3) WELL?

 

Whoops - I forgot to turn on caps lock. Oh well - this is why you buy some food to start. I eat well anyway.

A random event occurs:

RIDERS AHEAD.  THEY LOOK HOSTILE
TACTICS
(1) RUN  (2) ATTACK  (3) CONTINUE  (4) CIRCLE WAGONS
IF YOU RUN YOU'LL GAIN TIME BUT WEAR DOWN YOUR OXEN
IF YOU CIRCLE YOU'LL LOSE TIME

 

I turn on caps lock and attack.

TYPE BANGBANG

NICE SHOOTING---YOU DROVE THEM OFF
RIDERS WERE HOSTILE--CHECK FOR LOSSES
WAGON BREAKS DOWN--LOSE TIME AND SUPPLIES FIXING IT

 

Shooting, whether it's for hunting or self defense, is a timed minigame where you type "BANG" as quickly as possible. Do it in less than a second and it's a guaranteed success - take longer than seven and it's a guaranteed failure. How much food you take home or how many supplies you lose is a function of how long it took with some randomness.

MONDAY APRIL 12 1847

TOTAL MILEAGE IS 157
FOOD           BULLETS        CLOTHING       MISC. SUPP.    CASH
 27             2380           150            142            0
DO YOU WANT TO (1) STOP AT THE NEXT FORT, (2) HUNT, OR (3) CONTINUE

 

I'd better hunt, and I'd better be successful.

TYPE BANGBANG

RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES---YOU GOT A BIG ONE!!!!
DO YOU WANT TO EAT (1) POORLY  (2) MODERATELY
OR (3) WELL?

 

And that's pretty much the whole extent of the game, which took less than two minutes to finish from this point on. Food was never a problem - I'd hunt every day, always taking home more than I could eat, and never came close to running out of bullets or supplies.

A condensed timeline of April 12th onward:

• April 12th - 157 miles. Bandits attack, wounding an ox.
• April 26th - 319 miles. Encountered friendly riders. Heavy rains slow progress and ruin some supplies.
• May 10th - 476 miles. Encountered friendly riders. Ruined some clothing and food fording a river (this is not a choice in this version).
• May 24th - 615 miles.
• June 7th - 785 miles. Cold weather in the mountains slows progress.
• June 21st - 950 miles. Ox injures its leg, slowing progress.
• July 5th - 1055 miles. Heavy fog slows progress.
• July 19th - 1212 miles. Fought off bandits. Son got lost, costing half a day.
• August 2nd - 1374 miles. Heavy fog and mountainous terrain slows progress.
• August 16th - 1455 miles. Killed a poisonous snake. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• August 31st - 1535 miles.
• September 13th - 1705 miles. Ruined some food and clothing fording a river. Lost the trail and wasted a day.
• September 27th - 1784 miles. Heavy fog and mountainous terrain slows progress.
• October 11th - 1870 miles. Fought off wild animals. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• October 25th - 1974 miles. Bandits attack, stealing an ox.
• October 30th - 2040 miles. Arrived at Oregon City!

 

PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK SENDS YOU HIS
      HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS

           AND WISHES YOU A PROSPEROUS LIFE AHEAD

                      AT YOUR NEW HOME

 

I arrived with:

• 449 pounds of food (having started with 50)
• 1268/2500 bullets
• 102/150 clothing
• 125/150 miscellaneous
• $0/$700

 

So really, I came pretty overprepared. But maybe I could get there quicker with less hunting, and a bit more money spent on food?

I replayed and allocated my budget like this:

• $300 for oxen
• $240 on food
• $30 on bullets
• $90 on clothing
• $40 on misc

 

My trip:

• March 29 - 0 miles, 240 food. Hunted.
• April 12 - 165 miles, 269 food. Hunted. Encountered friendly riders, but got struck by mild illness.
• April 26th - 334 miles, 303 food. Hunted.
• May 10th - 509 miles, 324 food. No more hunting. Fought off some wild animals, but not before they got into the food and clothes.
• May 24th - 726 miles, 285 food.
• June 7th - 946 miles, 262 food. Blizzard in the mountains wastes time and supplies.
• June 21st - 1080 miles, 214 food. Hail damages supplies.
• July 5th - 1291 miles, 191 food. Wasted time looking for clean water. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• July 19th - 1446 miles, 168 food. Wasted time looking for clean water.
• August 2nd - 1661 miles, 145 food. Heavy fog and mountainous terrain slows progress. Blizzard wastes more time and supplies.
• August 16th - 1724 miles, 97 food. Cold weather. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• August 31st - 1895 miles, 74 food. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• September 13th - 2021 miles, 51 food. Wasted time looking for clean water. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
• September 14th - 2040 miles. Arrived at Oregon City with:
  • 51 pounds of food
  • 516/1500 bullets
  • 82/90 clothes
  • 11/40 supplies
  • $0/$700
     

For comparison, let's check out the 1978 version.

The first addition is a shooting difficulty option:

HOW GOOD A SHOT ARE YOU WITH YOUR RIFLE?
  (1) ACE MARKSMAN,  (2) GOOD SHOT,  (3) FAIR TO MIDDLIN'
         (4) NEED MORE PRACTICE,  (5) SHAKY KNEES
ENTER ONE OF THE ABOVE . THE BETTER YOU CLAIM YOU ARE, THE
FASTER YOU'LL HAVE TO BE WITH YOUR GUN TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

 

Option #1 is more challenging than the 1975 version, but #2 is easier. In fact, so easy that when I tried it, I never got anything less than the most desirable outcome. So for this runthrough, we're going with #1.

Then you get to spend your $700. My budget:

• $300 for oxen.
• $100 for food.
• $50 for ammo.
• $100 for clothing.
• $50 for miscellaneous.

 

This saves $100 for emergency doctor fees, which, unlike in the 1975 version, might actually be needed.

 

MONDAY MARCH 29 1847

TOTAL MILEAGE IS 0
FOOD           BULLETS        CLOTHING       MISC. SUPP.    CASH
 100            2500           100            50             100
DO YOU WANT TO (1) HUNT, OR (2) CONTINUE
?1
TYPE BLAM
BLAM

NICE SHOT.RIGHT ON TARGET.GOOD EATIN' TONIGHT!!
DO YOU WANT TO EAT (1) POORLY  (2) MODERATELY
OR (3) WELL?

 

Another gameplay difference here is that shooting now picks a random word to type - "BANG," "WHAM," "POW," or "BLAM," making you stop and read the word instead of just relying on muscle memory to tap out "BANG" as quickly as possible. Failures are much more of a possibility if you're playing on the highest difficulty.

Nevertheless, I won again easily. I hunted almost every day for the first five months, and ate well every day. The hunts weren't always successful, but overall still yielded enough surplus food to sustain my gourmandish lifestyle.

• April 12th - 178 miles, 121 food. Hunting successful. Failed to drive off wild animals, which got at food and clothes.
  
• April 26th - 351 miles, 128 food. Hunting successful. Fought off raiders. Indians helped locate more food.
  
• May 10th - 524 miles, 163 food. Hunting failed. Daughter broke her arm, costing supplies to make a sling.
  
• May 24th - 692 miles, 140 food. Hunting successful. Heavy rains waste time and supplies.
  
• June 7th - 864 miles, 151 food. Hunting successful. Hail storm damages supplies. Made it through the south pass before snowfall.
• June 21st - 1034 miles, 172 food. Hunting successful. Fought off raiders. Son got lost and wasted time finding him. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
  
• July 5th - 1129 miles, 193 food. Hunting failed. Cold weather.
  
• July 19th - 1305 miles, 170 food. Hunting successful. Fought off wild animals.
  
• August 2nd - 1480 miles, 175 food. No more hunting. Mountainous terrain slows progress.
  
• August 16th - 1633 miles, 152 food. Wasted time looking for clean water. Blizzard in the mountains wastes time and supplies.
• August 31st - 1748 miles, 104 food. Went hunting, but failed. Bandits stole an ox and injured my leg, costing me $20 for a doctor. Slow progress in the mountains.
  
• September 13th - 1870 miles, 81 food. Fought off wild animals. Slow progress in the mountains.
  
• September 27th - 2016 miles, 42 food. Fought off wild animals. Slow progress in the mountains.
  
• September 29th - 2040 miles. Arrived at Oregon City, with:
  
• 22 pounds of food
• 932/1500 bullets
• 64/100 clothes
• 8/50 supplies
• $80/$700

 

GAB rating: Average. Maybe I'm just too far removed from the 1971 classroom environment to really appreciate this, or maybe decades of familiarity with a keyboard and computer programming knowledge (I have not examined the source code closely) trivialized the difficulty.

Digital Antiquarian wrote, long ago,

As a narrative experience, The Oregon Trail is more compelling than it perhaps has any right to be. Its communications are terse indeed, but one really does get the sense of embarking upon a long and dangerous journey. As I limped ever close to my destination of Oregon City, with one of my oxen injured, low on food and supplies, with winter fast closing in, I felt real tension and concern for my little family. [...] The game is relentlessly unforgiving; failing to stockpile enough food for the coming turn, or enough medicine or bullets, leads to instant death. [...] It was a hardscrabble existence indeed on the trail, and I’m sure plenty of real would-be settlers died for exactly these reasons. There’s actually a consonance between gameplay and narrative that’s rather rare to find even in modern storygames.

This wasn't my experience at all - I did not need to make difficult decisions even once, not even when I played the more challenging 1978 version. Hunting was reliable enough that I never had to worry about where my next meal would come from, and never had to stretch my rations out to last longer. I never had to decide whether to push through the rugged mountains with my ill family and tired oxen with the looming threat of a harsh winter or to rest up and risk getting stranded with the Donner Party. Nor did I ever have to stop at the forts and desperately barter for much-needed supplies at inflated prices - even in my most disaster-wracked playthroughs, I'd arrive at Oregon in style with a surplus of Missouri-bought goods.

But the framework for that narrative is there, and I imagine it wouldn't be all that hard to enforce that unforgiving nature with some BASIC tweaking. Using the 1978 version as a baseline, simply cutting your budget by $100-$200 would go a long ways.

But for now, we're moving on.

Wrecking Crew: Won!

It's done. I had no idea a first generation Famicom game would take me more than a month to finish - but it did.

And the final six levels are all interesting! Please note that "interesting" does not necessarily mean "fun."

Level 95

Oh. My. God. There's Nintendo Hard, and then there's this. An almost entirely linear one-solution level that actually requires frame-perfect input to complete. Victory takes under 45 seconds, but save states weren't enough - I had to use TAS tools to finish this one.

Right from the start you are chased off a ledge and down a zig-zagging pattern of three floors with four walls to smash each, and no way of getting back up. You've got to start moving immediately and cannot pause for even an instant longer than needed to break each wall or else the eggplant man will get you before you drop down to the fourth floor. And that's not even the hard part.

Oh, no. The hard part is breaking the five brick walls on the fourth floor, which require 2-3 taps each, where you'll have an eggplant man breathing down your neck hard with a wrench not too far behind you. There's not nearly enough time to demolish this floor - you'll have to do half of it, drop down, climb up the ladder, and do the other half before dropping down again - and you only get one chance, because the wrench will make climbing back up the ladder a second time impossible. And for the three leftmost brick walls which are on the eggplant's patrol, you'll need to stand on exactly the rightmost edge of its bounding box - stand even a pixel to the left of it, and you'll get got as you swing your hammer.

A GIF best illustrates the solution - I slowed it down 3x during the impossible part.

I even duck under a fireball, which I didn't know was possible (and barely is).

All Youtube longplays solve this level with the golden hammer, which I am still certain was not meant to be found by normal players, let alone held onto this long.

Level 96

 

The hard part about this cluttered, confusing level is reading it. Otherwise, it's actually pretty fair. Challenging, but fair.

There's no slipping past the two Gotchawrenches on the upper floors. You have enough time to smash the walls, but the red wrench will climb the ladder here by the time you're done, and then there's no way for you to climb back down it - you will get surrounded. You can drop a barrel on one wrench's head, but this will just put the other one between you and the ladder.

So you'll need to use dynamite to drop down to the bottom floors, where you'll need to deal with three eggplants. One can be easily trapped inside the door here. Another can be trapped by breaking a support and stranding it ontop of a barrel. The wrenches can be dealt with this way too, but you'll need to plan carefully to not cut yourself off from an undemolished part of the stage.

Level 97

 

Huh, this one's rather easy! It took me a few tries, but still, this is by far the easiest level of the final ten.

It's tempting to go straight for the dynamite. In fact, this is the only way to demolish the two center ladders sandwiched between the barrels. But this will cut you off from the top floor - so go there first, avoiding the eggplants, break the walls, and don't touch the dynamite there.

Then you can go down to the fourth floor and use the dynamite.

There's still an element of luck. If you're unlucky, an eggplant will fall and land in the center of the stage where it will be trapped between the bottom barrels, making it impossible for you to get there yourself. But if you're lucky they won't, and will eventually wander into the barrel trap on the third floor, where they'll stay out of your business and allow you to finish the stage in relative peace.

Level 98

 

Right after the easiest scene of the final act, we go back to some frame-precise nonsense.

It's nowhere near as bad as level 95, at least. In fact, I beat it without using any save states. The solution has a little bit of leeway, and only one part of it requires absolute frame-perfect timing. Though fireballs just love to come at inconvenient times to ruin things.

First off, though, you'll need to smash the left of the two brick walls on the upper floor right away, and then tap the one on the right once. Spike will finish it off, knocking you down to the bottom.

Easy enough to run away from the wrenches here and climb up the ladder, where you can attack one of the floors.

Each floor is patrolled by a wrench, and has dynamite. Blowing yourself up is the only way to leave, but if you blow up the wrench, then it escapes too, and gets angry. Which is bad.

Start with the top floor - drop off, follow the wrench as close as you can, and hit the dynamite on the exact frame where it is possible.

If you do this right, you'll blow up yourself, the row of walls, and not the wrench, leaving it trapped on its floor. But if the wrench gets caught in the explosion, then it will drop down to the lower floor, and you'll have to deal with three wrenches there instead of two, moving at different speeds. Better you avoid that!

Next, go for the bottom floor. Ignore the walls - just hit the dynamite to damage them.

Getting back to the ladder should be easy if you've managed not to accidentally free any wrenches. Otherwise, it's a gamble, and fireballs just love to come at you while you're on the bottom floor.

Do the middle floor just like the top one - only this time you'll need to hit out the support before you set off the dynamite. Once again, you need frame-perfect timing to avoid blowing up the wrench here.

With a bit of luck, the wrenches should be grouped up enough that you can wait for them to climb down the ladder, wrap around, climb up and finish the lower level. And not get fireballed while doing any of that.

Level 99

 

This stage looks impossible. And it almost is. Clearing the top part looks hard enough, with Spike eager to knock you down and no way back up, but how are we supposed to clear both pockets of walls at the bottom? They're separated by an impassable barrel!

It's possible, of course. But you'll need to first clear the upper floors, and this part is insanity. You've got to break everything without Spike knocking you down, and without accidentally knocking him down either! I used save states freely, as I quickly lost my patience for even pretending to do it fairly.

Clearing the bottom floor isn't actually that hard. Save the fifth ladder from the right - the one directly over the barricading barrel - for last, and let Spike break it, knocking you right down into it.

I've used this trick before, but this time it is certainly the intended solution - you fall into the barrel's space, not onto it, and then you can reach out right to tap the dynamite without leaving the bounding box, and then left to clear the other pocket. Again, this feels dirty, but there can't possibly be another solution here.

 

Level 100

 

Deterministic chaos reigns this final level as six eggplant men climb up and down this cascading array of ladders, bouncing off each other, changing directions, and generally being hard to predict.

You'll need to clear the triangle of walls on the right before you can get too crazy with the dynamite, but these rows become inescapable deathtraps if an eggplant man (or fireball) enters before you leave.

It looks crazy, but you can introduce a bit of order here with a well-placed tap. Take out the third ladder from the left, and they'll settle into a stable and more manageable loop on the two leftmost ladders.

 

Of course, you might want to clear out the walls located on said stable loop before you do that.

Beat level 100, and your reward is to loop back to level 1, only now the fireballs start coming at you 4.5 seconds in (down from 30) and respawn in 4 (down from 12). Which does make the first dozen levels somewhat more interesting, but it quickly becomes impossible to deal after that, and the effect only lasts until your next game over or manual restart. They really don't want you to keep playing.

GAB rating: Average. Like Lode Runner, Wrecking Crew overstays its welcome with an overabundance of levels that wear out the formula long before it's over. Unlike Lode Runner, it never really finds its stride as a puzzle game. The toolset is just too limited for that. I got the most enjoyment out of the first 30 levels or so - there's occasionally a decent level after that which strikes the right difficulty balance or does something clever, but for the most part of the latter portion, when things are fair, they're too easy and/or familiar to be interesting, and when things are challenging enough to be interesting, they're unfair.

Game 409: Chaos: The Battle of Wizards

The subtitle "The Battle of Wizards" is seen on the main menu.

 

Rebelstar Raiders might have been the start of Julian Gollop's enduring legacy, but true Speccy fans know that Chaos: The Battle of Wizards was his true masterpiece. That is, at least according to Your Sinclair's Readers' Top 100 list, which places Chaos at #5, making it the second-highest ranked Spectrum game that isn't an arcade conversion, right behind Sim City, and right ahead of, um, Manic Miner.

Screenshot by Mobygames

Unlike Rebelstar Raiders, Chaos has no plot whatsoever, and the manual is all the shorter for it. Eight (or fewer) wizards enter an arena, one (sometimes more) leaves.

In fact, gameplay is quite a bit simpler than Rebelstar Raiders. This is a turn-based strategy game, and, as in Gollop's previous game Nebula, each turn is divided into three phases, each of which cycles through all players before moving on to the next phase.

1. In the spell selection phase, each player chooses the spell that they will cast this turn. The majority of spells are for summoning creatures, but a few more provide unique offensive, defensive, or utility-related effects. But your spellbook is random, finite, and with the exception of a "disbelieve" cantrip, spells are gone once chosen.
2. Next is the spellcasting phase, where wizards cast their spells, typically by selecting a target within casting range. A player may forfeit their spell, but it will be forgotten and removed from the spellbook whether you cast it or not! Spells can also fail by chance, and this becomes more likely the more powerful your spell is, or if the spell's alignment is contrary to the arena's current affinity.
   
3. Finally, there is the movement phase, where each wizard moves themselves and any summoned creatures, and combat is resolved between any unfriendly creatures in proximity. Some creatures can fly, some can be mounted, and others can attack at a range.
   

 

"It says f⬆king cobra" - D

 

Some surface-level observations:

• The graphics are very sparse and barren, which is largely a consequence of the ZX Spectrum's limitations, but it kind of works here, to create a starkly desolate atmosphere. Pure chaos, in the classical sense, if you will - you fight for your life in a magical void, a hellish oblivion of nothing but yourself, your foes, and whatever conjurations you brought with you.
• Sound effects and animations are rather good for a Spectrum game. Fireball effects in particular burn with a surreal fluidity that stills can't convey. Sadly, the sound of selecting a unit, which you'll be hearing constantly, is this grating clown honk.
  
• You can play against the computer, which is a very welcome addition. In fact, you can play with any combination of human and AI opponents, including an all-AI match that you sit back and watch. The AI isn't the greatest, but it's better than nothing, which is what Rebelstar Raiders offered.
  
• Keyboard controls are very similar to Rebelstar Raider's, but they are less forgiving. Illegal or accidental moves can be aborted, but this forfeits your turn in part or whole. Contrast with Rebelstar Raiders, where cancelling a unit's action retains all of its unspent movement points, and you may simply re-select it and perform a different action. I made multiple calamitous input mistakes while practicing against the computer, but eventually learned to be cautious.
  

 

Following our Rebelstar Raiders campaign, The Wargaming Scribe organized an eight-player PBEM battle royale with his usual suspects. And what better way to experience Chaos than a maximally crowded arena with seven other wizards flinging magic at each other? Read his AAR of a match against seven computer opponents here.  

 

The wizards play left to right, top to bottom, assigning me (a golden figure self-styled as Ahab the Idolator) as the last player.

I have reconstructed a video of the match, using RZX recordings exchanged via email. Spell selection is skipped, as we opted to perform this in secret.

Turn 1

In a real hotseat game, where the phase screen is seen by all players, we would have knowledge of each others' spellbooks, and also have imperfect information on each others' spell selections, but in our PBEM game, we conceal the spell selection phase from each other. I do not know what anyone else has at their disposal, nor what they have selected. For what it's worth, computer players also conceal their spell selections from you.

Colors indicate the relative chance of a successful cast. White always works, yellow has a base chance of 80%-90%, cyan 60%-70%, and green 50%. More powerful and difficult spells - typically high-tier summons such as dragons - exist as well, but I have none. Each spell also has an associated alignment, of law, chaos, and neutrality, indicated by the icon preceding. A successfully cast law or chaos-aligned spell will tilt the arena in that direction, making opposite-oriented spells more likely to fail.

All summoning spells may optionally be cast as an illusion, which have 100% success rates and are just as powerful as true summons. But illusions are vulnerable to the disbelieve spell.

My summons, from least to most powerful:

• Giant rat - Weak, average in speed. High manoeuvre rating, which allows a chance to escape from combat.
• Zombie - Slow and weak, but undead, which makes it invulnerable except to magic and other undead creatures.
• Eagle - Average strength, decent speed. Flies over obstructions so long as its destination is clear.
• Ogre - Above average strength, average speed, good defense.
• Lion - Strong, with above average speed and defense, and high manoeuvre.
• Pegasus - Fast but weak flyer, with strong magic resistance. Can be ridden.
  
• Hydra - Strong and resilient, but slow.
• Wraith - Undead with above average strength and defense.
• Ghost - Flying undead. Weak, but slippery.

 

Other spells:

• Disbelieve - Instantly destroys an illusionary monster. Does nothing if the monster happens to be real. Everyone has this spell, and it alone can be cast unlimited times.
• Lightning - Medium-ranged attack spell.
• Law - No miraculous effect, but tilts the arena's affinity toward law.
• Chaos - Likewise, tilts the arena's affinity toward chaos.
• Justice - Destroy a creature.
• Raise dead - Reanimate a corpse, turning it undead and under your control.

I select my ghost, and soon after, the spellcasting phase begins.

• Morpheus summons a zombie.
• Mad Porcus a red dragon - a powerful, flying monster with a deadly long-ranged breath weapon, but notably, one with a very high chance of failure to summon, unless cast as an illusion!
• Rastignak summons a faun, an unremarkable monster of average strength, good manoeuvre, and magic resistance.
• Lynx gets a horse, a weak, somewhat fast mount creature.
• Dayyalu a goblin, a chaos weenie, but positioned as if to attack me.
  
• Scribe fizzles, which is too bad because the attempted spell, Shadow Wood, would have flooded his sector of the arena with immobile but deadly tree monsters.
• Argyraspide summons another zombie.
• My ghost comes out fine.

 

Two events occur during movement.

First, Porcus' dragon flies to the center of the arena and torches Lynx's poor horse.

 

Second, Dayyalu and his goblin move in a little too close for comfort, so I preemptively attack with the ghost.

 

One wizard down.

 

Turn 2

I am in no immediate danger, so I decide to cast Law for now. It seems that my enemies are mostly chaos-aligned, and if this can waste any of their spells, all the better for me.

• Morpheus fails to summon a wraith.
• Mad Porcus subverts Rastignak's faun, converting it to his own command!
  
• Rastignak fails to subvert my own ghost.
  
• Lynx disbelieves in the red imagine dragon, and it promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
  
• Scribe summons a hydra.
  
• Argyraspide casts a double chaos spell.
  
• My law spell succeeds, but the net effect of the round is still chaotic.
  

 

 Predictably, Rastignak is subsequently killed by his own faun.

As for the rest:

• Morpheus and his zombie shamble toward Lynx
• Lynx, caught between a zombie and a five-headed hydra, moves toward the zombie. Best possible move, really - the hydra would kill him this turn otherwise.
• Scribe's hydra moves toward Argyraspide. Or is it toward me?
• Argyraspide and his zombie shuffle toward me.
• I recall my ghost, and reposition myself away from the corner.

 

Turn 3

Argyraspide is just close enough to be a potential threat. I prepare my wraith, which now has an 80% success rate in the arena's chaotic affinity.

 

And it fails! Thankfully, so does Argyraspide's attempt to cast Shadow Wood, which would have surrounded me with deadly trees.

• Morpheus summons a hydra of his own.
• Mad Porcus a ghost.
• Lynx casts Decree, a law-oriented spell canceller, on Morpheus. The manual says that when targeting a wizard, it can destroy all of his creations. The spell doesn't seem to fail, but also doesn't seem to do anything.
• Scribe casts Magic Wood, instantly sprouting a grove of five magical trees that can grant new spells to whatever wizard enters them.

 

Amazingly, Lynx survives being double-teamed by Morpheus' hydra and zombie. Scribe retreats to a tree, and I advance toward Argy.

Turn 4

If I were Argy, I'd be looking for a Hail Mary about now, and summon something nasty, or at least fast. If he does this and succeeds, then I'll die this turn.

If he casts a deadly illusion, then disbelief is all that can save me. If he casts a deadly non-illusion, then my spell choice doesn't matter and all I can hope for is that it fails. And if he does something non-deadly, then a disbelieve would be a waste but I'll still live. Therefore, I prepare a disbelieve spell.

 

My logic pans out. He summons a vampire illusion, which I immediately vanquish.

Meanwhile, Morpheus summons a unicorn, Mad Porcus a hydra, Lynx a red dragon, and Scribe a crocodile.

Lynx, surrounded by a small army of monsters, does not survive this round, and the dragon is expelled with him.

Mad Porcus moves southward, toward Argyraspide. Scribe moves his hydra to attack Morpheus, Argyraspide moves toward Scribe (and away from me), and I follow.

Turn 5

I prepare another disbelieve.

• Morpheus blasts away one of Scribe's trees with a lighting bolt.
• Mad Porcus summons a bear - strong, and somewhat agile.
  
• Scribe, another crocodile.
• Argyraspide, a gorilla - a fairly strong but slow creature.
• I target Argyraspide's zombie with my disbelieve, but it fails.

 

Mad Porcus's army starts moving in! I retreat and move my ghost between Porcus' bear and myself.

 

Turn 6

Another turn, another disbelieve.

 

• Morpheus summons a Pegasus.
• Mad Porcus lightning bolts his own faun. Misclick, or madness? Either way, it lives.
• Scribe disbelieves Morpheus's unicorn, to no effect. He learns a spell from his magic tree.
  
• Argyraspide summons a giant.
• I cast my disbelieve on Mad Porcus' ghost, removing it as a threat to my own.
  

 

Mad Porcus gathers his armies as my ghost closes in, while Morpheus and Scribe exchange blows, resulting in the death of Morpheus' Pegasus and hydra.

Turn 7

Safe at last, I prepare an illusion Lion summon. It's fake, but it's deadly.

• Morpheus also summons a lion.
• Scribe summons a vampire.
• Mad Porcus tries to dispel my ghost with a cast of Vengeance. It doesn't work.
• Argyraspide tries to cast Shadow Wood again, targeting Morpheus' turf. It fails again.

 

Morpheus futilely attacks Scribe's hydra, while Mad Porcus even more futilely attacks, and then backs away from my ghost.

Scribe has a very productive round indeed - the hydra kills Morpheus and vampire kills Argyraspide.

I pursue Mad Porcus with my ghost and lion.

Turn 8

I get another disbelieve ready. Unfortunately, so does Mad Porcus, who correctly guesses I was "lion."

Scribe summons an orc as I disbelieve his vampire.

 

Scribes' monsters move forward as my ghost continues to haunt Porcus.

Turn 9

Porcus fails to summon a magic castle to hide in, but succeeds in getting his faun and hydra away from my ghost even as I disbelieve his hydra. Scribe summons a gorilla and moves his increasingly large army closer still.

Turn 10

Porcus successfully casts Magic Wings and transforms into a batman. I prepare to disbelieve his hydra, but Scribe beats me to it and disbelieves it himself. I doubt his gorilla - turns out to be real.

As Scribe's army moves closer (and he hides under the last magic tree), I with draw my ghost to attack Porcus' faun. I have good reason for doing this.

Turn 11

Porcus casts law, shifting the balance away from chaos, and flies off to the side. Very quickly too - was it a mistake to let him live last turn?

Scribe gets a spell from his last magic tree, summons another orc, and starts assembling his monsters into a line formation. I summon a stronger ogre and move to protect my flank.

Turn 12

Porcus casts magic armor, boosting his defenses and further transforming his appearance, and flaps himself a bit closer. Scribe futilely disbelieves my ogre and moves closer still. I summon a zombie and move into position for the next turn.

 

Turn 13

Ineffective disbelieves fly back and forth, but I finish Porcus with a cast of Lightning Bolt.

Scribe and myself move our armies toward the front line.

Turn 14

Scribe summons a zombie of his own, and I use my chaos spell. Some fighting happens in the middle as Scribe's monsters fail to pull themselves away from my ghost, which they cannot harm.

Turn 15

Scribe attempts to blast my ghost with lightning, but without line of sight, this doesn't work.

Aided by last turn's chaos spell, I raise the dead faun, adding it to my small but nearly invincible army of undead, which continues to stonewall Scribe's monsters. The fighting continues, and my zombie eats Scribe's orc.

 

Turn 16

Scribe doubts my faun is real, but it is, and I summon a hydra of my own.

In the fighting this turn, his zombie finally destroys my ghost. You had a good run, Casper.

Turn 17

Scribe doubts my hydra, but it is indeed real. I try to lightning his zombie, but it resists and is unaffected.

Scribe's gorilla gets my hydra, but my undead faun gets his zombie. Good news - there is no longer any counter to my remaining undead. Bad news - I have an angry and rather strong gorilla after me.

 

Turn 18

Zombies prove oddly resilient to magic yet again, as Scribe flings a bolt that bounces harmlessly off mine. I summon a giant rat, placing it strategically so that the gorilla can't throttle it to death this very turn.

Unluckily for me, Scribe's alligator eats my ogre, and even worse, the gorilla manages to slip away from my undead duo and lumbers toward me. And my own creatures's attacks do nothing.

Turn 19

Scribe, out of spells other than disbelieve, forfeits his phase, and I use mine to disbelieve his crocodile.

As expected, his gorilla stomps my rat flat and the rest advance closer. My undead faun breaks from the melee, but I myself retreat into a corner.

Turn 20

Trapped, I cast my most powerful spell - Judgment. This destroys Scribe's crocodile, and turns his gorilla into a rat. My undead pair are free - but I'm all but stuck in a corner, with a deadly hydra looming close.

Turn 21

I summon Pegasus, but I can't tear myself away from Scribe's gorilla-rat to mount him. Good news - I kill it with my bare fists. Bad news, Scribe's hydra slides into my personal killzone. Best I can do is put the Pegasus between it and me and hope it lives long enough to fly away.

 

Turn 22

As Scribe's hydra and Pegasus stare down, we mutually disbelieve them.

I mount Pegasus, shrugging off attacks from the hydra and orc. If he survives the next turn's attack, I might win. If not, I almost certainly die.

 

Turn 23

Pegasus survives the attack. We fly away, leaving behind my final summon - an eagle.

Turns 24-28

Scribe concedes the match, though he might not have had he known that it ends in stalemate on turn 30. I play for both of us, and on turn 28, my zombies eat his brains.

I won, but the victory felt a bit hollow. I made a few strategic errors, though with the sheer amount of unforgiving randomness, it can be hard to tell good strategic decisions from bad ones. I made no tactical errors at all; every move either improved my position by the end of the turn or had a chance to, and no action's immediate risks outweighed the immediate benefits. Some of my opponents did make such tactical errors, whether that meant wasting a spell, or exposing their wizard to something that would kill them the next turn, and I exploited these mistakes well.

But none of that felt like it mattered nearly as much as dumb luck. Everything you do, save for the most mundane actions, is checked against one or more dice rolls. So is everything done to you - and while skilled play can give you more opportunities to deliver killing blows, and give your opponents fewer, no strategy beats a lucky potshot, and no strategy succeeds if your spells keep blowing up in your face and your opponents' don't. I survived because every high-stakes move that I made succeeded, and every chance that my opponents had to ruin me failed, starting from the second turn when Rastignak's chance to kill me with my own ghost failed, to the very end when my desperate cast of Judgement succeed against a chaotically-aligned arena and deleted two of Scribe's monsters, and his surviving hydra, having two opportunities to ruin my day by killing Pegasus, whiffed it against the odds both times.

Even the ghost I summoned on turn 1 was lucky - it had a 50% chance to fail. But in retrospect, I could have cast it as an illusion - for all the disbelieving that went on, nobody ever disbelieved that!

This PBEM match took a good month and change to complete, and in the meantime I had played some hotseat matches involving both humans and AI opponents. My wife "D" hates this game and refuses to play it again, which might have something to do with how her only move in our only match was an attempt to cast lightning bolt without realizing it was out of range, and that I got her with a dragon illusion the same turn. "B" played a few matches and enjoyed it more, but there was a pattern; matches begin with an opening salvo of sniper shots and disbelieves before turning into monster melees between the survivors, the size of which depends greatly on how many summons are real and/or successful.

GAB rating: Above average. Chaos is undeniably a well crafted game, but not a well designed one. I personally prefer Rebelstar Raiders' flavor of disbalance, where even though the attackers have a significant-to-extreme advantage depending on the map, your speed and performance still depends on how good (or poor) your strategy was.

Wikipedia offers this definition of a "beer and pretzels" game:

Rules are simple and generally explainable in just a few minutes, turns pass quickly and humor is common. Randomness, either in the form of cards or dice is essential. Fortunes may revert quickly and the game often ends suddenly and unexpectedly. Scoring requires very simple calculations.

 

That describes Chaos almost too perfectly. The rules and flow are intuitive and straightforward, even if some of the spells' conditions and effects aren't always immediately obvious, but you learn them with experience. The simple subsystems compound and interact in complex and unpredictable ways, but there isn't as much strategic depth as there might have been; the absolute success and failure chances ensure it, but that was never the goal here. I mean, wizards aren't even created equal - some flat out have better stats than others! But every duel has the potential for some crazy shenanigans, and damn if it isn't entertaining to see how it all unfolds. And big matches probably play even better in hot seat, where complete turns take minutes, and losers can stick around to watch the wizardly mayhem, and then demand a rematch.

 

Here are a couple of Chaos' more egregious examples of being unbalanced:

• Easily the most common example - strong, fast, flying monsters, like dragons and vampires, are almost pointless to cast except as an illusion to kill someone on the same turn. If a player going before you does this, then the only defense is to have picked disbelieve as your spell for the turn - hence my midgame paranoia.
  
• If a player going after you summons a powerful illusion, then your only defense is to kill them before they get to move.
• Undead, as we've seen, are nearly invulnerable, very capable of clogging up the battlefield, and a wizard without undead of their own can't do much about it.
• Better still - if you can manage to cast "raise dead" on a horse or other rideable creature, then you get a zombie horse that you can ride and become nigh-invulnerable!
  
• There are a number of instant summon-kill spells with unlimited range, and when cast on an enemy wizard, this removes all of their summons. Against a wizard with poor magic resistance, this has a pretty good chance of working. Especially the varieties where you can select three targets - just target the wizard three times!
  
• Shadow Wood has an insane range for a spell with a 60% base success rate and lax line of sight rules that can instantly surround an enemy with killer trees. It's a miracle that this did not happen to me during the match.
  

  

  Ahab eats it, Saruman-style.
  

  
  
• All flyers have a non-LOS ranged attack, and I assume this is a bug. By moving onto an enemy, instead of next to it, you attack without moving!
  
  

  

  Ok, who gave Batman a sniper rifle?