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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9626966" data-attributes="member: 7044704">He looks really nervous, doesn't he?  "Is someone following me?"There are so few choices available to the monster player that this might as well be a solo game, and it was inherently played as such IME.  Not even a good game that way, but as a solo at least only one person's time is being wasted instead of two.Weirdly, this would be also be published (with minimal changes - die cut counters and a color map) by Task Force Games as part of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_/_The_Barbarian" target="_blank">dual Survival/The Barbarian "baggie' game</a> - and in the same year, no less.  I believe Survival came from another WD issue as well, but I've never seen an explanation for this odd arrangement between two companies that didn't really have much to do with one another.I'm inclined to agree with Aaron Allston's review, which panned Barbarian and gave Survival a modestly positive review.  Both games are pretty much random dice-fests with little in the way of strategy, but Survival at least had some replay value and a few significant choices to be made, as well as getting some further support through Nexus magazine.  Also had a 16K computer game version that came out in 1983, although I've never actually seen it.Well, kind of.  It was 4e that introduced the idea of short rests to rapidly recover HP, but 3e could certainly kill you if you took enough Con damage although HP recovery (barring ubiquitous healing magic) was still slow.  d20 Star Wars is the first WotC set I can think of that did an explicit divide between temporary/lasting damage tracks.  Don't think it was anywhere near the first to come up with the general idea though.  For ex, Villains & Vigilantes has always had hit points (dying if they reach zero) and power points, with the option to "roll with the blow" and shunt damage over into PP loss instead of HP, up to a limit of 10% of current power per attack.  Like many later systems with a split health/fatigue mechanic you also used spent PP to fuel powers and movement, so you could wind up having to make hard choices about how much to conserve them in longer fights.  Champions has also always had a divide between BODY (the "kill you" stat) and STUN (which knocks you unconscious if depleted).This would have been a real negative for me back in the day, and might explain why I never owned a copy - although I might have just missed it, WD was not easy to get reliably in the US this early on.  One of the major draws for gaming mags in the Long Ago Times was getting to see industry news and reviews - a role that's be completely usurped by the internet these days, of course.Did any of these weirdos make it into FF?  I don't recall them if they did.Melee and Wizard probably rival Ogre/GEV when it comes to "I've heard of that game" but they didn't sell as well overall.That said, Ice War was definitely one of those gems and was extremely popular with the wargaming community for a few years, in large part due to having fantastic replay value and surprisingly tight balance unless you get very unlucky when trying to decide how to spend your unit point budget - some skews will play very badly into others, and you won't really know what you're facing until it's too late.  Still well worth a play even today, and there's something strangely nostalgic and yet ludicrously inappropriate about having the Soviets invading Alaska for US oil in this day and age.Black Hole isn't up to the same standard but is still somewhat interesting, with the only toroidal map I've ever seen in a wargame - the battle takes place on a small planetoid shaped like a donut, with a tiny black hole right in the center and few abandoned alien installations around the inner equator.  The shape of the battlefield obvious has huge effects on lines of sight and lines of fire, and you can attempt risky "jumps" from any hex on the inner face of torus to any other which only occasionally wind up with getting sucked into the singularity by accident.  Sadly, that's let down by a very lackluster combat system relying on a bare-bones old-fashioned CRT and a dire lack of unit variety (basically small, medium, and large vehicles, all of whose defensive stats are identical).  This one could probably be pretty good with a remaster that addresses its weak spots, but I doubt it's ever going to happen.</blockquote>

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