Neal, you and me share the same fate!

[Skybird]

... we were misunderstood back in those years!

In your review for "Silent War" you wrote: "When I was a kid, I even created my own submarine board game to recreate the experience of stalking the enemy convoys in the open oceans." And about that game you said: "What you see before you was created about 27 years ago and never made it out of the beta stage due to a lack of qualified testers. Usually referred to as "The Submarine Game," Neal's SUBSIM Original predated Windows 95, DOS, and BASIC. This was analog in every sense of the word. The original was recently dragged out from the dark recesses of my parent's attic to shine in all its glory as a momento of my yearning for an authentic submarine simulation." And it looked like this:






Well, I recently found a black monolith:



It appeared from a huge box of dust-covered things when I cleaned up my cellar. I opened the box and what I found was this:





It must date back to around 1987, the printing is done with Paint II and Beckertext II for Amiga. Unfortunately, the map is no longer available, it was roughly 1x1 meters in size and featured a hand drawn map with superimposed hexfield-grid (that I also manually draw, which was done with precision, but took me several days...), that featured several basic terrain types like clear, forest, water, hill, mountain, and some features like rivers, roads and mines that generated the game's currency if owned by a player. The terrain was also separated into several "zones", so that events like weather changes were locally only, not globally. The map was framed by a racetrack of playing fields in Monopoly-style. The players threw dices and moved a playing figure on the outer track, basically to land on fields that triggered certain actions and game mechanisms, or that allowed them to draw event cards of two separate kinds, one type effecting general play on the outer track, the other type of cards influencing the tactical play on the hex-map by triggering random events, weather processes, and such. The player battled for the possession of mines (of different value), that produced the game's currency. This was used to buy combat units, that were two-stepped and were needed for conquering mines, and transport the minerals to the production sites.

I had used metal rings and hand-painted round paper-stickers to create the two-sided playing pieces, of which these classes existed:



As you see with some special units, the game had quite some free space for not-too-serious stuff, too, and many event cards also featured my queer sense of black humour.

For combat and movement, I used a simple system of tables where random event and game condition were cross-referenced.



The game was tested for some weeks with some friends, since it allowed 2,3 or 4 players, but they were more and more alienated, which may had something to do with the fact that already back then good ol' Skybird had a faible for writing long and extensive essays, stories, novels - or game rules:



In the end, the end, the game was played in full for just one time. but that time was really a session, and lasted for two days, and most of the night! and i may say, it worked quite well. It functioned as a crossing between "Career", "Monopoly" and "hex-cosim light".

Those were the days of enthusiasm, and just doing it!

After that match, "Conquest" unfortunately never was played again. When mentioning it, the author just earned bewildered looks and painful smiles...

Maybe we should build a team and form our own game company?

The black box, btw, is from an original MicroProse title.

[Wim Libaers]

I did the same thing once. I do have the impression that mine was a bit simpler, but it was still complex enough to ensure that anyone who was asked to play it suddenly had something else to do.

It was never played, and eventually thrown away. Doesn't matter, I had some fun making it, and it was a square grid anyway, no big loss.

[Onkel Neal]

Wow, I am impressed! You took it to a whole new level, Sky. Are you sure there are that many pages of rules? Or did you stack the one rule page on a bunch of your old psych school papers ?

Man, I wonder how many guys did that when they were young, made their own game? My game came about because I found Battleship to boring... first I made variations on the Battleship game, such as one player had all ships, the other two subs. And the subs player could move on his turn, which meant the ships player had to unpeg and start over. But the ship player could call 5 shots each turn. And that led to my idea of making a completely new game...



Neal

[Skybird]

I had no alternative to doing it myself, for this has been the kind of game I always had looked for. Cosims ("Kriegsspiele") were frowned on in Germany and only rarely to be seen oin stores, I did not know about them, and to some degree cosims still are considered to be off limits and politically most incorrect. My first cosim I ever bought was Third World War 1: Battle for Germany, which I heared of short time after doing "Conquest", and it was like a revelation for me. Remarkably, their and my system and tables for deciding combat results almost were similiar! Maybe that is the reason why the TWW-series by Game Designers Workshops always have been one of my favourites, although it was played on division level, while Conquest was about one counter representing one formation, team, squadron, whatever.

The rule booklet is no more complete, btw. Originally, it had been two booklets. The second is MIA.

[TteFAboB]

Well Neal he's German. He has to write every possible rule to every possible question otherwise it goes kaput. That, and also because he probably wanted to torture his friends making them go through two booklets before playing. Weed out the weak and nimble while sitting back and relaxing while the poor survivor burns his brain assimilating all the rules. He'd be so confused at first Skybird would just steamroll and blitzkrieg him to pieces.

I've made my own ground combat game too. Tactical. Much less rules, much more simple, to be finished in just a few hours.

Glad to know I'm not alone.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by TteFAboB

... otherwise it goes kaput.

Kaputt. With double-T please

[TteFAboB]

That rule wasn't in the manual!

:rotfl:

[Onkel Neal]

That's pretty cool

[Deamon]

Oh yes, i remember making paper games out of boredome as i was on vocation out of reach from my Amiga. And ceased to do so once returned home to my Amiga. I guess computers are to appealing to me for paper games.

Deamon