Lucifuge Dragon has updated the Sixth Circle website with a harrowing story of a session of his board game adaptation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate…in which the Guardian very nearly managed to invade Britannia.

I worked feverishly to get the latest updates to the Black Gate completed for this play through. There was some minor rule changes that smoothed things out, and a few new cards implemented in the dungeons that added some nice flavor. Also some of the values of enemies were modified to help put things in balance. By my calculations this would be the 6th play test of the game. To give you some history, the first four were far too difficult and the fifth was far too easy. I think I found a good mix for this session.

We had a rough start to say the least. Right off the bat, Gord (Bearington), stepped out from the safety of Paws with only his starting equipment and was immediately man-handled by a troll. Within two turns I drew a reaper from the encounters and was pounded into a poisoned, burnt corpse. The futility we displayed was embarrassing but we shook it off and went back out into the wild. Gord then ran into a Silver Serpent and was instantly poisoned and dead within two attacks. Ten minutes in, the Guardian was already well on his way to Britannia, I honestly thought we were done for early on.

The rest of the quest plays out in more or less the same skin-of-the-teeth fashion, saved as much by the luck of the (card) draw as by anything else. It sounds like Lucifuge has put together a really excellent set of mechanics for the game overall, requiring players to navigate all the high points of the original game’s plot. Hopefully a means of distributing the game publicly can be settled upon; I’m sure many Dragons would love to get their hands on a copy of this.