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Looking for an old Non TSR Board Game / PBM (Late 80's?)
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Invincible Overlord
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Post Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:12 am 
 

So I was at my FLGS introducing Terraforming Mars to a couple of players, when the store owner asked me if I could recall a PBM based off a D&D-type board game from the late 80's. I played a few PBM's back in the day. and was a subscriber to Flagship, but I had no clue of what he was talking about. All I know is that it wasn't the AD&D PBM... not much to start on...

The way he described the board game to me was that you could muster armies and conquer lands on the board. One you were able to develop an Avatar-type unit, conquering became way easier... Somehow they adapted a PBM loosely (?) off of this board game.

Legends was the first PBM game that came to my mind. It fits the time frame, but I don't recall a board game that it was adapted off of...


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Post Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2018 11:36 pm 
 

Hmmm.  Doesn't ring any bells to me either, but you might point him to Rick Loomis (he's on FB and can be reached by the Flying Buffalo site), who's very knowledgeable on PBMs.

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Post Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2018 5:39 pm 
 

Yes, Legends was a popular one at the time.  A couple of other ones were Heroic Fantasy (80's) and Middle-Earth (90's).

Talaran, Land of Challenge was the TSR attempt to enter this market, but it never took off.

Other than those three, there were a lot of other PBM games.  Here's a list:

Play by Mail Games List

Here's a comprehensive list of PBM and PBeM games:

PBM / PBEM List: All Games

Wikipedia has some potentially useful info on the topic as well.

Play-by-mail game - Wikipedia
  

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Post Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 11:09 am 
 

Invincible Overlord wrote in Looking for an old Non TSR Board Game / PBM (Late 80's?):So I was at my FLGS introducing Terraforming Mars to a couple of players, when the store owner asked me if I could recall a PBM based off a D&D-type board game from the late 80's. I played a few PBM's back in the day. and was a subscriber to Flagship, but I had no clue of what he was talking about. All I know is that it wasn't the AD&D PBM... not much to start on...

The way he described the board game to me was that you could muster armies and conquer lands on the board. One you were able to develop an Avatar-type unit, conquering became way easier... Somehow they adapted a PBM loosely (?) off of this board game.

Legends was the first PBM game that came to my mind. It fits the time frame, but I don't recall a board game that it was adapted off of...


No "board" game, but that sounds a LOT like an old BBS system "door" game that I can recall playing in the early '90's. It was called Battlefield and the only SysOp in our area that ran it had a Macintosh computer, so I never was able to find a PC copy. You created armies, moved them across a virtual board and battled other player's armies. If you conquered the other player, you took over their units and occasionally, randomly, a computer "unit" would show up and if you beat them you gained units that were pretty much invincible to anything else on the board. Sorry, but after almost 30 years that's all I can recall.
  
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