Archon and other combat chess games

Glass.Cannon

So I just noticed an ad on here for what looks like a remake of Archon. I always loved the idea of that game, bad as the implementation was. Anyone know if the remake is fun, or if there are any other games similar to it that would be worth looking into?

For those who aren't familiar with it (probably most of you), Archon is an old NES game (likely PC as well) structured vaguely like chess. When pieces meet on the field, they go into an overhead area and shoot at each another until someone dies. I like the idea of combining strategy and fighting while keeping both separate, but Archon didn't really do either well. I'd love to play something in the same style that does it competently.

wonderpug

Pretty sure the game predates the NES by at least 5 years.

Personally I grew up with it being a 5 1/4 floppy called "Archon, Zaxxon, 1 on 1" for my old IBM.

SmokeStacks

I maintain in every thread that mentions Archon that, while it was an incredible game, Dark Legions was better. It was made by SSI and Silicon Knights (back when SK knew what they were doing).

It was more tactical in the sense that, instead of having a standard square chessboard, you had an actual environment, with trees, rocks, bodies of water, chasms, and so on. Various characters could move in different ways (the Water Elemental could move to any point in a body of water it is currently in, flying creatures can cross water and chasms, etc), most of the characters had special abilities (the summoner can summon other creatures, the healer can heal, the conjurer can summon apparitions as decoys, the blind seer can tell which creatures are conjured as well as spot traps, the thief can defuse traps, the fire elemental can detonate in a suicide explosion, etc).

It's an incredible game, but I read that it didn't sell very well because in 1994 most people were playing some new game called "WarCraft", made by some company called "Blizzard", and weren't interested in TBS anymore.

joshgotro

Tell me Dark Legions is available?

Elvenshae

joshgotro wrote: »

Tell me Dark Legions is available?

I own a copy, so it's available to me.

Have to run it (and install, unfortunately, IIRC) in DOSBox, though.

Just like any other "Build your army with X points" game, however, you can certainly min-max the heck out of your army. I really liked the trap tiles' implementation in this game, too.