Kidnapped by the Barbarian Prince

What happened to Paul?  He was posting so regularly for a while there, and then suddenly he dropped off the map.

Here’s what happened to me: I discovered this game The Barbarian Prince.  It’s really Maliszewski’s fault, look you can even see the date of the post which drew my attention to this game is about the exact same time I stopped posting. Curse you Maliszewski!

This little gem of a game from back in 1981 is now freely down-loadable thanks to the kind folks over at Reaper.  The rules and events booklets are conveniently available as word docs as well as PDF, so it was trivial to reformat them to booklet size, print them out, and staple them together with my handy long reach stapler.  (Really, if you’re into old school stuff, go buy yourself a long reach stapler, you won’t regret it!)

The map was only slightly more difficult.  I printed that out on four sheets of sticker paper and then stuck them together on a big piece of poster board.  The miniature is a pendraken 10mm barbarian, who fits perfectly in the hexes at this size.  Here’s the end result:

Seriously, this is a fun game.  I highly recommend you check it out.  It kicks my ass every single time, and yet I love playing it.  The emergent story it produces is always fantastic.  Even Lydia likes to play it:

5 thoughts on “Kidnapped by the Barbarian Prince

  1. It is indeed. I’ve played it over lunch the past couple days. If you print out the map and tape it to your magnetic whiteboard, you can then use a magnet to mark your position on the map. Then just have the booklets open on your computer in PDF form and a pair of dice and you’re all set!

    Still haven’t won yet though.

  2. (1) Oh man, this looks awesome.
    (2) Like I said on Grognardia, there was a detailed review of this game in Dragon like 30 years ago that made me really want to play this.
    (3) There should be an OSR blog titled “No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die” of some riff thereon.

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