A Barbarian Prince Schools Me On D&D

[Weregrognard]

So last weekend, I downloaded, printed, and played an old-school, solo RPG-style board game called Barbarian Prince (download it free and legal). In a nutshell, you play an exiled barbarian prince, wandering around the map getting into all sorts of Choose Your Own Adventure-style wackiness while trying to make enough money in order to field an army to reclaim your lost birthright.

This game is HARD. Nintendo hard! In a few plays, I was eaten by wolves, killed by a dragon, and ran out of time. (Did I mention it was timed? You only 10 game weeks before you lose!) But you know, I had a blast playing it, and I'm itching to do so again.

So what did this teach me about D&D? That sometimes, hell, most of the time, it isn’t about "winning" and being awesome. It's about the experience, the fun of getting into all sorts of trouble and oftentimes failing spectacularly.

That, and the map can totally be used for a D&D hexcrawl campaign

 

[David Howery]

I had the original version of that game way back in the 80's, one of the old Dwarfstar games. It came with a lead miniature of the prince that you had to paint up and use to mark your place on the map. I still have a couple of others they published, "Dragon Rage" (basically, a walled city protects itself from dragons/giants/assorted monsters) and "Demonlord" (a smallish board wargame that has human light worshipers vs. a vast army of demons and allies). The latter is actually a pretty good and balanced game. Sadly, I manged to lose "Barbarian Prince' somewhere along the way... I think the box and map finally just disintegrated after years of being tossed into boxes as I moved...

 

[Serendipity]

Loved that game so much back in the day. I've recycled the map for D&D at least once.....

 

[mach1.9pants]

Thanks for the link!