Barnes' Best II: The 1970s Hot

Just a nitpick - Magic Realm predates Mystic Wood.

[continues reading...]

No Divine Right? No Squad Leader?

Yeah, Divine Right and Squad Leader deserve some love, and also Starship Troopers.

Ah, you're right, Mystic Wood is later...I'm thinking Sorceror's Cave.

Divine Right isn't on there because I've never been able to play it. Having looked over the rules, other than the TONS of fluff and chrome, mechanically it doesn't look all that great. I traded it to Mr. Moto, so ask him about it...and I'm glad it came up because I owe him the CD out of it and that reminded me to dig it up.

Squad Leader is kind of a mess. It's an important game, yes, but it's not one of my favorites. I like ASL better, by far. But I don't think I'd even class that as a favorite.

Remember- this is my personal favorite games. Not yours. :-P

Yeah, I can see you're interested in that Sorceress' cave! :)

Colt 45....every time.

Going over this list, I was a little bummed to see that most of these games are hopelessly out-of-print, besides Cosmic Encounter. A lot of them are approaching in a new edition (Re-Dune, Awful Green Things, Ogre), but most of those are in the "believe-it-when-I-see-it" phase of reprinting.

I feel like I'd love Magic Realm and Robin Hood. A buddy of mine once landed Magic Realm in a math trade, but immediately flipped it. What a waste.

Really? I was kind of surprised that so many were either back in print or on the way. Other than Dune, which is not being reprinted. The Twilight Imperium game based on it might be good, but it's not Dune. Never will be. Done.

Magic Realm...never will be reprinted. Ever. Bank on it.

I didn't put RPGs in there because I did want to keep it board games. Aside from that, other than D&D, what else deserves mentioning? Maybe Fantasy Trip, but that's about it. Tunnels & Trolls is 80s, isn't it?

Man, I really want to try Colditz and Robin Hood, and of course play more CE and MR. There's some good stuff from the 70s. Wonder if I can get a chick in a bikini to play with me while we drink Colt 45.

I'm well aware it's a list your personal favorites, I'm just letting you know that your personal favorites ARE WRONG!!

Never tried Robin hood, but maybe I'll actually put together that graphical remake of Robin Hood this weekend and try it out.

Well, maybe I should say that the stuff I want to play most (Dune, Robin Hood, Magic Realm) are out-of-print, with nothing on the horizon. I hate having to chase down copies of this stuff to play it. Dune is my most sought-after game, but it always costs a mint.

Oh yeah I really want to try Dune too. Incidentally I started dating a girl about a month and a half ago who loves Dune (the Lynch movie), hates games that thematically have no ties to anything she knows or cares about, but wants to try some of my games that look cool. I'm doubting that TI3-pseudo-Dune will cut it!

Nice list. Divine Right is decent game, and we do need to play it.

The game that shouldn't be in there is Speed Circuit. That is a little too dry, and is a fairly stripped and themeless version of the excellent Formula One.

Things that could have been there:
The Creature That Ate Sheboygan (1979).
Star Fleet Battle Manual (1977). This is still my favorite of the Star Fleet Battles-ish games. It is simpler, sillier, fiddly as hell, and open space minis. But I love it.

Orion (1971). The concept is cool. It is a set of 12 games using a modular board where you turn knobs to move pieces. There is a mix of modifications of existing abstracts and new games. It is one of those Astron-rare mass-market games that no one has heard of that popped up and vanished in seconds.

Sopwith (1978). This is the forerunner to Wings of War, Blue Max, Canvas Eagles..... Sopwith's simplicity still makes it just as good as those games. Gametime Games did a ton of REALLY amazing games. There are 3 I have yet to play, and Spellmaker is the game I most want to love. It is a crazy fusion of Euro and AT where you cast spells to attack each other by playing combinations of cards. Just go and look at the list: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/455/gametime-games

Maybe I need to play Cosmic with Trash players. I HATED it playing with pure Euro players because the game was over analyzed beyond it's death.

Mr. Barnes... you are truly an ageless enigma. Looking at your pictures, I would have thought you were too young to remember games of the 70s.

When are we going to get some blog posts by moofrank on his picks? I want a list of nothing but Yugoslavian imports and hard-to-track-down Vichy France edition Othello sets.

Our family loved playing Mastermind in the '70s, but by the early '80s, we were burned out on it.

Billy Dee Williams said it best...you truly belong with us among the clouds. http://bl0g.delobi.us/images/IMGP0229.jpg

I've just quickly skimmed the list (read nothing) and it looks great. For all you yanks that can't get hold od Colditze, it's a fun game but it can get old quickly - plus the rules have a few holes in them so you have to agree on a few things before hand .... but there is nothing like getting a couple of big dice rolls and playing the Kommandant's Staff Car card to piss of the Security Office player.

I wouldn't expect much of a fight over this one. Pickins are pretty slim for the 70s, and you've got pretty much all the obvious ones on there.

It would have been nice to see Wizard's Quest on there, and I probably would have substituted a few Metagaming or SPI games for some of the entries. Really, though, almost everything back then was either wargames, wargames based on trash fiction (Proto-AT), or mass market stuff. It wasn't until the very late 70s that the latter two categories started to converge, and start culling elements of RPGs. It's very hard to come up with a list of favorites that isn't redundant, as even this one is to some degree.

When you get to the 80s, it'll be a bloody uproar. That's where you see the real schisms among the AT crowd, With a lot of people coming to hobby games through more mainstream MB stuff, the hybrid games of GW, and the "pure" hobby AH-style games.

There's some overlap between those three strains of AT, but which type of those games you preferred then does seem to inform your tastes pretty heavily now.

Chasch: Barnes wasn't even a sperm when some of these came out (nor was I, for that matter). I will tell you, though, that committed Eurolitists are NO FUN playing Cosmic Encounter. I love that game so bloody dearly, and I only play with people that have absolute moral flexibility. We're talking the kind of people that would slit your neck on your lunch hour and eat your jelly sandwich while you're bleeding out kind of people. It's EPIC.

Here's the scoop on the Colt 45 Bottoms Up game according to BGG:

It gets 5 ratings (4 "2"s and 1 "3"). One of the guys who rated it a 2 left this comment:

"Overrated"

I guess he doesn't know what the guy who rated it a 3/10 sees in it.

A weird thought occurs to me.

I'm pretty damn sure I don't know a single person who'd be willing to quaff a whole glass of Colt 45, and also know who the hell Jack Benny is.

Ya know I have the small box Ogre and GEV bought at a Gamer's Paradise in the mid 80's. I never bought the original small box illuminati which I still like. I only broke out the GEV once at my grandma's with my brother and we never got past the rules. We were pretty young.

Illuminati deserves more credit than it gets in my opinion. Played i alot in college and for me it was THE GAME that exposed me to board gaming outside the traditional milton bradley and parker bros. mold. Different objectives, multiple winners, negotiations etc were all totally new to me in a board game format. I never played any avalon hill. I remember looking at them in the hobby shops while I was buying modules for D&D that I wold read and never play.

We did play aloy of car wars. another fun small box set. SJ had some momentum in 70's. Toobad all that remains is Munchkin. (GURPS is still my favorite role playing system)

Illuminati and Car Wars both came out in the 80s. Like I said, that's where you'll see the most divergent opinions.

mj -- I am the person who would drink an entire C9 and know Jack Benny.

The only one I would switch out is Wizard's Quest instead of Speed Circuit. WQ is the first game I ever remember playing and it has always had a soft spot in my heart. If I wasn't so lazy, I would find a picture of the orc tokens and make that my avatar. For a risk-esque game, it had some neat things going on with the heroes, Peacemaker, the Dragon, and the Orcs. We had one game where the orcs won.

I had a copy of 'Escape From Colditz' I played a lot with my brother and sisters, but it is one of the few games (along with Monopoly) I don't have fond memories of. It was because we decided that the German player could not win, because there was no time limit on the prisoners. They could happily sit there collecting items and waiting for the perfect chance to escape with no risk of losing the game. My parents still have it collecting dust, so I have been meaning to grab it off them for another look. Hopefully someone has come up with appropriate time/turn limits for the game to make it playable.

The 70's were such a cool time for hobby gaming. The average gamer could watch it start to blossom, while still managing to stay on top of each new product that would come along. It was a magical feeling, and Michael does a good job of reconjuring it by exhibiting the youth-fueled affection that we all had for those amazing, new games.

Wizard's Quest was the game I was thinking of that we played. I don't think I've ever played Magic Realm.

I didn't really like Wizard's Quest. It's too chaotic. Also way too much time is spent administrating the neutral armies (the orcs). Whenever I've played, the players have quickly made a pact to wipe the orcs out just to save on the time overhead of working out their moves.

Escape from Colditz is a fun game to pull out once is a while. It does get old quickly but the solution is just not to play it very often! I suspect it actually wouldn't be that easy to "fix" with some new rules and cards and such - that's probably partly why no-one has picked it up. But it does to a fantastic job of capturing the essence of prison breaks. Come to think of it, that's actually a tremendously under-utilized theme. Be interesting to see some more modern games on the subject. And Barnes is right about British family games: they tend, as far as I can tell, to be rather more interesting than American ones.

You and Bill went to great lengths to tell everyone what hard work it is to write a professional review for a limited paycheque and I don't doubt at all that it's true: but nevertheless you seem to have both forgotten that in spite of all that there's an army of people out there who would give their eye teeth to be able to write about games for even a modest fee. Don't forget how lucky - and talented - you had to be to get that gig.

MuMu - the way to play Colditz is to decide a time limit for the default win conditions (one player has to have two prisoners out) or a combination of time limit and prisoners escaped. But we seldom worry about a German win as it is just fun playing it and sometimes we'll carry on after the time has expired, I remember one recent game at our club where we had got quite a few escapes in the 2.5 hours and I went home but they continued playing and I think the poor guy playing the Security Officer had virtually an empty castle when they finished :D.

What a great list MB. It bought back a lot of good memories.

If you were including RPGs Michael the only three worth mentioning would be D&D/AD&D, Gamma World and Traveller. The little black box from GDW contained so much awesomeness in just 3 booklets. Man I miss GDW...

My own personal lis would be a bit more wargame-centric and include titles like Squad Leader, Victory in the Pacific and Imperium.

-Will

Nice review on the Marvel tables. Two issues: (1) the flippers reverse due to Mysterio (not the pumpkin bomb), and (2) I started out liking the Spiderman table the best, but, as it turns out, it really is the easiest table. There is not a lot of discovery there, and once you figure out what you should do there isn't much challenge in completing the missions.

This list is so cult of new back in the 70's. That Colt 45 game is awesome - that guy is so going to get some action, and using liquor to do so is actually ruled into the nights entertainment.

Imperium and Wizard's Quest were both on my "brainstorm" list. Wizard's Quest has some clunk to it, and Imperium feels like it's not quite complete. Both are really cool games, no doubt- and both are also quite original. But ultimately, I don't think I'd bill either as a favorite.

Colditz definitely has some problems if you break it down to the rulebook...but I don't care, because every time we play it, it's awesome. I usually play the Nazis and really just kind of run the game and make sure everyone's having a good time since I can't win.

You can definitely see pretty much _exactly_ what my taste in games is from this list. Thinking about it, almost every single thing I look for in games is represented on this list. Every game I like is descended in some way from what's on display.

As for the 70s, what I think is really interesting about this time is that you had this emerging awareness that games were something that you could be "in to". And there was also this notion of making games more adult and marketing them as something distinguished from kid's games. There was some of that in the 60s too, but with the rise of historical consims and RPGs, that's when things like theme, narrative, and detail became very important.

It's also interesting because really, there aren't that many truly great games from this time. If I expanded this to 20 entries, I think I'd have a list of pretty much all of the best and most important games of the time. Beyond that, there's a lot of stuff that either is forgotten (TONS of wargames, for example) or that has aged beyond value (again, TONS of wargames).

But you've really got the foundations here, particularly when you start getting into 1978-1979.

As far as RPGs, you could skip Gamma World (which is just a little TOO much D&D in the future), and replace with Runequest. The BRP system from Runequest is the foundation of amazing amounts of RPG design, and it is the direct parent of Call of Cthulhu (still the greatest RPG ever made).

I'm trying to think of other good games:

Submarine: Put in some plastic pieces, and put an MB sticker on it, and we would still be raving about this one. A great low complexity game.

Stop Thief: A great electronic game that is still entirely playable today.

4000 A.D.: A purely hardcore no-luck, no hidden movement sort of wargame. Actually leads to some pretty tricky diplomacy. Based around the idea of moving large fleets of ships taking several turns to reach the destination. Or any destination that is the exact current distance--so you can change your mind in flight. The terrifying "largest fleet destroys the smaller and doesn't take damage" makes this more nerve-wracking. Think Galcon the boardgame.

...and then I realized that Mike Grey was designing for MB in this time period.

Carrier Strike: It was my favorite when growing up, but it has problems. Our house rule of moving one set of planes and one carrier makes this still fairly playable. And...pops up in at least one other place.

I might be alone in this, but my favorite game from the 70s that didn't make your list is Circus Maximus. I love it, clunky flaws and all.

I find it really amusing that the box lists the complexity of it as a "2 out of 10" and in the rules, they constantly refer to it as a pretty easy, straightforward game. Which it is (especially compared to other games from the time), but it's a behemoth next to most modern rules sets.

Yes, like the old AH "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Games but Were Afraid to Ask" brochure, wherein they boast about Walter Cronkite's love of Waterloo.

Circus Maximus was shortlisted, and in retrospect, I might have put that on there over Speed Circuit. There are a lot of similarities. But there's so much detail and so many wild things that can happen. I think the design is really cumbersome though, all those tables, sometimes you roll 2d6, sometimes you roll 3D6, and there's not really a coherency throughout.

I never played Runequest, so that's in that category. Likewise 4000AD and Submarine. Stop Thief is really neat though.

Circus Maximus still draws pretty good crowds at WBC. Part of the appeal is that the GM has several pimped out copies of the game where the track is blown up so that it is about 10 feet long and they use minis . Speed Circuit is run in a similar fashion - each track is taped together using PDF files so it is about 8-10 feet across. I think both games on a standard size board would lose a lot of appeal.

Damn, am I the only one that keeps glancing at this article on the front page, solely to admire that fabulassity? The damn thing's magnetic! The folks at Colt45 surely knew their work. :P

Sadly, my 70's faves pretty much had MB, ParkerBros etc on the sides. I didn't really spend time in hobby shops until D&D hit in early high school (late 70s, but again, we're exculding RPGs). :D Didn't really become aware of Ogre until later, into the 80s.

I do recall seeing Awful Green Things and Food Fight in Dragon mag, at the time, but I don't recall ever popping it out and playing either one. Sadly, all of those old Dragons went out in the pre-marriage toy purge. :D

Damn, am I the only one that keeps glancing at this article on the front page, solely to admire that fabulassity? The damn thing's magnetic!

Not at all. I'm captivated by it. I think that whatever the game's object is... the woman must be losing. I thought for a second about actually drinking some Colt 45... but then I remembered being a homeless busker and decided it was a bad idea.

Kingmaker is 70's game that did something different then the normal hex and counter wargame, and still has plenty of fans. I don't know if it's top 10 material for me, but it's worth giving mention to.

Kingmaker and Junta were the two I was going to mention, as well as the Rail games such as 1829, Rail Baron, and Railway Rivals. I prefer Kingmaker over Junta and would probably sneak it into Mike's Top 10 but it is hard (impossible) getting it played these days.

Empire of the Petal Throne if we are talking RPG's at that time. That was 1975 I think.

Definitely Warlord which was a great 'risk-type-build-up-lego-bricks-of-atom-bombs-and-fire-them-at-other-areas' type game later reprinted and ruined by GW in the eighties.

As mjl pointed out my recollections and experience apparently only extend into the 80's. Eagerly awaiting that list.

I know there's an age spread here. Clearly people played some of these when they came out. Fo those of us in diapers in the early 70's and not even in the double digits by the 80's- how were you you exposed to these games?

Maybe the question is best directed at Barnes as the author of this list. We seem to be of an age. I remember being fascinated with these older games when I finally made my way into a real hobby shop but also a little scared of games I had never seen at the local Venture or Sears toy shelves...

She's winning like Charlie Sheen!

One thing that exposed a lot of people to games released before their time- Avalon Hill kept a A LOT of stuff in print for a very long time. Talk about an immense game catalog. Games that came out in the 60's and 70's could still be ordered new in the 80s and 90s.

Who wants to guess his 80s list?

Talisman
Tales of the Arabian Nights
Civilization
Space Hulk
Fury of Dracula
Borderlands
Dungeonquest
Up Front
Really Nasty Horseracing Game
Survive!

I'd imagine the 90s list will be mostly German games (rightfully so)...and will therefore piss people off.