Lucifuge Dragon’s website has been dormant for a few weeks now, but he broke that silence over the weekend with a post summarizing a recent three-person playtest of his board game adaptation of Ultima 7: The Black Gate. To this point, he has been testing it only as a two-player game, and the addition of a third party member made for some interesting moments in-game, both hilarious and disastrous.

But first…Lucifuge has also made a few changes to the game’s mechanics:

Two main things were changed for this game, one was that I reworked the magic scrolls so that anyone could now cast them with an an intelligence roll. I also added new magic wands for the magic users out there. I made three different wand types (Fire Wand, Lightning Wand, and Magician’s Wand) each with varying power. The kicker is that a wand will break upon a critical fail. Scoots was brave to play his first game with an untested character build.

The other big change was that I removed the encounter rolls all together and added many more cards to the encounter deck which do nothing but comment on the weather. Now anytime you move outside of town limits you are forced to draw an encounter. This eliminated a lot of unnecessary rolling and worked very well, it also added a little bit more atmosphere to the overland.

He and his friends actually played two rounds of the game. In the first one, the Guardian reached Britannia; the game was lost. It was in the second game that things got interesting:

Like pretty much every game of the Black Gate….disaster struck and man was it a doozy. Scoots had our only ship deed, more money than he knew what to do with and, for good measure, the Compassion virtue. This virtue acts as an insurance policy. When you have it, you can rest assured that when you die, the only thing you’ll lose is the virtue. Perfect, he had the majority of the wealth and items at the time, he should have it…right?

We set sail for dungeon Hythloth on the Isle of the Avatar. The first card we draw in the dungeon is a locked door. As we were all out of lock picks, we all got back on the boat and departed for nearby Terfin where Scoots decided to spend ALL of his money on both regular and magic items. He got some lock picks and we went back to Hythloth. We breezed through level one and kept going into level two when he drew a dragon. It wasn’t our first so we were not concerned. Scoots went to blast it with his powerful wand and rolled a 10. Critical fail, the wand was broken. It was one-of-a-kind in the game but since he got so much life out of it he didn’t take it too hard. “No problem,” he said “I’ve got a backup Lightning Wand.” Bearington and I each made our attacks and then Scoots rolled for his and got another 10. Broken.

We all burst out laughing as Bearington and I both fled from combat. Scoots had to roll to flee but he tripped on his shoelaces and failed. The dragon ripped him apart. When you die in the Black Gate, you typically lose everything in your inventory, including ship deeds if you are carrying one. That’s fine, your friend can pick up the boat and claim the deed for himself and maybe give it back to you. So Scoots spawned back in Vesper…and thankfully the Compassion virtue allowed him to keep his items. Including the ship deed. Bearington and myself were still on the Isle of the Avatar.

The pieces suddenly fell into place and we realized we were trapped there! We laughed till we cried, it was the most epic fail I’ve ever seen in any game. I had never even considered the possibility of that happening as there are now so many items and different mechanics that it has started to take on a life of it’s own.

I think it’s safe to say that the game is developing quite healthily, if moments such as this are happening.