This is a boardgame that is old enough of be considered a venerable classic. It’s also known for being actually rather awful as my boardgame friend once warned me. It does have so many expansions that it must have its share of fans and I was curious enough to want to try it when it was included in a bundle of other such boardgame adaptations.

This version I bought included a couple of expansions, The Highland and The Dungeon. I only played the game briefly however, enough to win a couple of times and trying out various heroes for a short time. That’s because the game really is as bad as they say, being pretty much an exercise in pure chance and I have zero desire to play any more, let alone buy more expansions. It’s even worse as the original rules state that all characters ought to be chosen randomly. This implementation thankfully allows you to relax this rule as well as employ alternate ending conditions that help make the game shorter.

The premise is that the characters are all competing with one another to be the first to reach the center of the board where the Crown of Command is located. Since the path there is difficult and well guarded, the players will first spend time becoming more powerful. Killing monsters can be directly turned into the Strength and Craft stats which is easily guessed as measurements for physical and magical prowess respectively. Characters can also gain a wide variety of equipment, followers and spells to increase their personal power.

Movement is distressingly akin to old-fashioned games like Monopoly. Roll a die and move that number of spaces, except that you can move in either direction. You then execute the instructions for that space which usually involves drawing a number of cards from the appropriate deck. Combat is a simple die roll added to the appropriate stat for each combatant and comparing the total. If you encounter another character you can also challenge him or her of course. You can only ever lose 1 hit point per fight however so even if you lose it takes a while to die.

This may not sound too bad but it’s random systems piled on top of random systems. You have the die roll determining movement, drawing of cards to determine what happens and many encounters have random effects based on a die roll. I still can’t believe for example that there is spell literally called Random that can give a character a permanent Strength or Craft or take away all gains since the game started. One space has you dicing with Death, which is just toss two dice for you and for your Death every turn, don’t move until you win the toss. Once you do reach the center of the board, you have nothing to do every round except roll a die to see if you can do 1 hit point of damage to all other characters. It can take a long, long time to kill everyone this way due to the randomness and the fact that they’re free to move around and take measures to heal themselves.

Characters only interact with one another if they share the same space or through spells. This means that most of the time, you don’t really care what they are doing. Combine this with the fact that there are a lot of turn skipping effects in the game, it gets very boring and you really need to max out the AI playing speed to make it tolerable. The spells however are the exception as many of them can be cast at any player at any location. They also have nasty effects like the aforementioned Random spell and stealing items, followers or spells of the caster’s choice from the target. This is exactly as infuriating as you imagine. It gets really insane if you have multiple caster characters, such as Sprites, playing as those can instantly refill the spells they use. It also slows down gameplay to a crawl due the delay built in whenever a spell is cast to allow for interruptions and the like.

I suppose it can be satisfying when things go your way but it’s all down to luck anyway so who really cares. I can only imagine the hair-pulling levels of frustration when you attempt to play this with real people and the consequent slowness and endless waiting around. If you squint hard enough, you might be able to see why there are people who might like this but in this day and age there are far, far games to spend your time with.