Hex-map Renaissance

I grew up in a small, midwestern town, listening to my uncles' Yes albums but singing in a traveling Christian family band. (Yeah. F'real.) Full of 'why is my brain crammed with this mess' ennui. It sucked.

One of the few non-sucky bits was Lord of the Rings, which I got at 10 as a gift from a family friend. Guy who gave it to me was different - the locals thought of him as a hippie, and maybe he was. But he was also shrewd and odd and funny, full of answers with a lot of spin and truths other adults wouldn't cop to.

I didn't know the dude at all, really, and yet he saw me floundering, I guess, and gave me something he thought might help - The Lord of the Rings, just out of the blue. The world went all technicolor for me with those books. I read them and read them, the usual story.

That's not all, though. A then a couple later, he contacted me (now 14) - would I like a Middle-Earth game? I rode my bike over immediately. It was the full 'War of the Ring' game from SPI. He'd bought it in a moment of enthusiasm, only to later read the rules and realize there was no shot in hell of getting anyone to play this with him in our tiny Indiana town.

But he didn't read the rules right away, and here's where it gets to transcendent levels of sweetness: He'd taken the six or eight paper hex-maps you were supposed to tape together on your table, and he'd mounted it to 3/4-inch corkboard using rolls of translucent film. The thing was about five feet square, weighed about 20 pounds. Clearly loot of limitless value.

Now imagine this mounted on 3/4-inch corkboard, laminated, and irradiated from a chunk of pure Awesomium, and you'll get an idea what Kratz gave me. An astonishing gift. I wish I still had it.

I played War of the Ring like a sickness for about three years - solo - using some foe-randomization tables I vividly remember in form but not function. (I'm guessing the foes were designed to get beaten brainless by my 14-year-old powergamer self.) Yes, that's how badly I wanted to play this game - as an 8th grader I filled notebooks with 'sauron action charts' so I could play against myself and pretend it was all up in the air.

And deep! That game was old-school in its viciousness; I particularly remember drawing a palantir at the wrong time and just setting the game back up. I haven't read the rules in a generation, and have no idea how they've aged. I do remember a vast number of special cases and exceptions, most of which were super sweet.

One of the criticisms of Ameritrash board games (of which War of the Ring is an early example) is that, to fit with a theme, they tend to railroad one toward the strategies employed in the theme - which, in the case of WotR, meant that the West could win on a ring-dunk but never through another method. I don't remember WotR doing that at all; the West won every way imaginable, and their losses weren't all the same either - corrupted ring-bearer, Saruman rising, blowing too many resources on trying to raise the northern dwarf armies, etc., etc.

So, what? It's clear I love this game. I love other games too - notably roleplaying games - and in certain corners of this Intarweb thingy, folks have painted millions of electrons sharing their recollections of great rpgs past and thinking hard about teh Awesome contained within. We've called it the Old School Renaissance, but it's really a front in the DIY War: We insist on making our own Awesome, thank you very much, and further insist on just sharing that stuff around as widely as possible.

So here, today, I propose a new front in the DIY War: A renaissance for these amazing, dense, baroque combo war/strategy games. The marketplace says simplify - I say complexify, densify, baroquify and make lovely. More Awesome required. Let's get to it.