King of Dragon Pass

A local magazine praised this game way back when and I managed to find myself a copy. It's been an all time favourite since. It has a strange kind of magic to it, you fall in love with the world and start really caring for your clan just by looking at the artwork and some stats.

Admittedly I'm no expert on the game, I play things like the Total War series, Europa Universalis 3 and many other strategy games. I have however recently spent quite a bit of time trying to learn the ins and outs of this game. As a clan you must appease your god through sacrifice and god-quests representing a significant drain on not only your resources but the risk of losing your clans backbone (the characters). Every time you change something the season is moved forward and a random event happens... not too bad so far aye? Well the problem is as a peaceful clan (you know the one that are all farmers and potters) you never seem able to get enough food or defence to protect your holdings going. As a balanced tribe you gain no real advantage because you need the extremes to even make minor headway and as such the biggest reliance factor is on the totally random objects you discover. As a war clan you will be beaten now and then by armies that should not of been able to recover the manpower, slowing down the raiding you need to accomplish to feed your clan and when your 300 strong force steals a whopping whole 27 cows while an enemy sneaks past your built tower, crosses your no mans land ditch over your stone wall then sharpened palisade stealing 30 cows apparently straight out the only way (the front door) of course 'without being noticed' you quickly find this game for all it supposedly offers is a waste of time. The game has a lot of promise in it, it can in fact be fun. However do not look at this game to be any sort of enjoyment if you would like to feel like you've got any control building, maintaining and expanding a tribe and it's abilities because simply put you have slim to none in control. The easiest setting alleviates none of this titles problems and to be completely honest the options don't really seem to change (there are set events like duck-men taking over some of your land), the quests are a little different but you can send 2 completely similar questers through the trials and one will die with the exact same choices seeming not to take into account attributes or in fact whether there is a right or wrong choice. You can and I have had over 60 'knights' protecting the land and still have people breaking in to steal your cattle without getting caught, begging the question why have defenders or defence at all? You would naturally think okay switch to diplomacy but the random events like tusk raiders etc. mean that you will still be bent over a proverbial barrel as you get raipded time and again. At the end of the day after playing all 3 clan types I don't actually see much use to any of them, they change your magic allocation at the start of the sacred year but don't seem to really do much for you. In summary this game has too many flaws to make it a game you will continue to waste time learning how to be good at and if you are someone who will, you will find yourself sorely punished by it's inherent randomizations that in essence robs you of any control over how the game plays out.

This is a fun concept with some bitterly frustrating execution. Once something bad happens, bad things continue to happen, until your clan dissolves. I want to like this game, but the odds are stacked too heavily against the player for my liking. The "random" number generator isn't just hostile, it's actively malevolent. King of Dragon Pass is not a game, it is digital masochism. This coming from someone who genuinely enjoyed Demon's Souls. I tried, again and again, to forgive this game because of it's enjoyable premise, but I've had enough. I uninstalled it earlier, and I do not recommend anyone else pay $7 for this exercise in futility. Trust me, you don't need this in your life.

I like the idea that quests are unpredictable and, despite the best preparation, they can fail, wiping out some of your best characters. But if you invest the time prepping for them, by learning the lore, assigning quest points and hoarding magic, should you really fail 4 times in a row? At some point you get sick of it, especially when you have to guesstimate your chances of success, since there's nothing to reference. As you might imagine, it takes forever to learn the mechanics of this game. The tutorial is pretty broad and it's a niche game so even if you google how to do this or that you can come up empty handed. If you enjoy learning the ropes by trial and error mixed with a healthy dose of cross referencing google, then this might be for you. But then, as far as I can tell, even you do things "right" you have a substantial chance of failing. Finally, as other people have said, the writing is pretty uninspiring. It's true that you have million different decisions to make, but the way that the game gets away with giving you all that freedom is by making the outcomes of those choices relatively meaningless. You will probably get a few follow up events each requiring all of one click, but story doesn't change. You just end up with slightly more or less men/resources. Meh.

I'm not sure how I missed this one back in 1999 but I'm glad I now have gotten the chance to play it. It takes me back to the days when I had been in the military for a few years and had finally saved enough money to buy my own first computer. I was a big fan of turn based games that had the added level of good random story to them such that you hardly ever got the same play through twice. This does that.