Back to board games with this episode, where I do double-coverage by talking about both another paragraph-based game and another Eric Goldberg game. The game is Tales of the Arabian Nights, originally published by West End Games in 1985 and republished and revised by Edition Erlkonig in 1999. In this one, you and the other players take on roles from the Tales of Scheherazade and have adventures around Baghdad and the surrounding barbarian lands, only to return home with great stories, to meet your destiny, or even to become Sultan.
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Over on Matt Barton’s blog Armchair Arcade, he’s started a series about the origins and history of the computer RPG. The first installment features games from the time period smack dab in the sweet spot of this podcast: 1980-1983.

As someone who wrote a basic RPG for his Zenith computer out of frustration (not a lot of games for that platform) I found this pretty fascinating. I’m looking forward to the next few installments, assuming that he gets to them.

(Yes, this is from last month — still catching up).

One thing I’m going to try to do this year is post more news of interest to the Vintage Gaming crowd. So I have a few items here, some older, one new, that will get things started.

First up is an article by listener Gnome, about the early days of the first person shooter. Good stuff, and there’s other retro gaming goodness on his blog as well, so check it out.

Secondly, if you haven’t seen it already, Ryan Dancey, former CEO of Wizards of the Coast, is predicting doom for the hobby game industry in 2007. Not strictly a vintage gaming article, but I thought it had some general interest.

Finally a couple of reprints of highly sought after (and hence expensive) board games. The first is the Games Workshop classic dungeon crawler Talisman, which is being reprinted by Black Industries, a division of Games Workshop. The second is the Avalon Hill classic wargame Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, which is being reprinted by Valley Games, who previously did a nice job on the Die Macher reprint. The plans for Talisman are to incorporate rules from all the previous editions with some new speedy rules (huzzah) as well. Hannibal, on the other hand, will be nearly identical to the 2nd edition.

As it’s been a while since I’ve done a pure computer game, I decided to do another blast from the Macintosh past. This time the game is The Fool’s Errand, designed and created by Cliff Johnson, and originally published by Miles Computing. It’s a puzzle game that should hopefully appeal to you pencil puzzlers out there. I also talk about the follow-up games At the Carnival and 3 in Three, as well as the sequel, The Fool and His Money.

I also give the final winners of the Politika games, and talk about some recent appearances on other shows.
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Finally I return to games that most would consider “vintage,” this one being both 20 years old and out of print. The game this week is Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, a paragraph-based deduction game from Sleuth Publications.

I also talk a little bit about the Politika pair of shows, and the continuing Politika board game giveaway. Yes, I managed to get one, maybe two, additional copies. So if you’re interested, drop me a line by Dec 31.
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This month is the 10-year anniversary of the founding of Red Storm Entertainment. As a commemoration, I’m doing a two-parter [go here for Part 1] on my experience as lead designer on Tom Clancy’s Politika. Not a well-rated or beloved game by any stretch, but I thought that relating our experience would help any aspiring designers out there to avoid the mistakes we made. This week I’m covering the things that I thought didn’t go so well — tune into the previous episode to hear the game description and the things that I thought succeeded.
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This month is the 10-year anniversary of the founding of Red Storm Entertainment. As a commemoration, I’m doing a two-parter [go here for Part 2] on my experience as lead designer on Tom Clancy’s Politika. Not a well-rated or beloved game by any stretch, but I thought that relating our experience would help any aspiring designers out there to avoid the mistakes we made. This week I’m covering the things that I thought went well — next week, the parts that, er, didn’t go so well.
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And right on the heels of the last episode, a Halloween-themed show, where I cover some vintage board and card games with horror themes.
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This week on The Vintage Gamer, I cover one of the few threats to Dungeons and Dragons in the fantasy role-playing game market — and one of my favorite RPGs from my past: DragonQuest.
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