Chaos: The Battle of Wizards
Publisher(s)	Games Workshop
Designer(s)	Julian Gollop
Platform(s)	ZX Spectrum
Release	EU: 1985
Genre(s)	Turn-based tactics
Mode(s)	Single-player, multiplayer

Indeed, if you’re a fan of Castle of Chaos or the horror genre in general, there’s a huge chance that you also have a special place in your heart for dragons. Although they’re not the first monsters we typically associate with horror, these mythical fire-breathing beasts have no doubt shaped our classical and contemporary conceptions of. Sonic and his friends were defeated. They lost everything, their homes, their planet, and their lives. Now overlanders most stand up and fight for them equipped only with the powers and guidance of the fallen heroes gifted to them.

Chaos: The Battle of Wizards is a turn-based tactics video game released for the ZX Spectrum in 1985. It was written by Julian Gollop and originally published by Games Workshop. Based on Gollop's 1982 design for a board game / card game hybrid,^[1]Chaos received a positive reception and went on to influence various games, including Darwinia and King's Bounty, and spawned a sequel, Lords of Chaos, in 1990.

Gameplay[edit]

Lord Of The Castle

In the game Chaos, players take the role of wizards who vie with one another to win the game. The aim of the game is to be the 'last wizard standing' by destroying all other wizards. The game allows for anything between two and eight wizards, any of whom can be human or computer-controlled. The level of the computer-controlled wizards must be selected, ranging from 1 to 8. Higher levels improve the computer wizards' combat statistics, but do not improve their artificial intelligence. Computer-controlled wizards do not cooperate; they will attempt to kill each other as well as the human players.

Each wizard is given a random selection of spells at the start of the game with which to defeat the other wizards. Spells are either Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, and have a difficulty value expressed as a percentage chance of success when cast. A spell can only be cast once, with the exception of the 'Disbelieve' spell which is always available to every wizard. New spells can only be acquired via the 'Magic Wood' spell. During the game, the type of spells cast affects the subsequent difficulty of other spells. Casting many lawful spells results in a more lawful environment, which in turn makes other lawful spells easier to cast. The same principle applies to chaotic spells. Spells of the opposite alignment are not more difficult to cast however. Neutral spells are unaffected either way, and are always cast at the same difficulty percentage. This feature has a big impact on the strategy of the game, as a viable tactic is to cast many easy spells of a certain alignment, in order to make it easier to cast the more powerful spells of that alignment.

Spells fall into various categories and have various ranges. Creature spells summon a monster adjacent to the wizard, which can then be moved in the movement phase. Some creatures are more difficult to cast than others, with the more powerful creatures having a lower base percentage chance to cast. Creatures have attack and defense ratings which govern how effective they are, move ratings which control how many squares they can move a turn, maneuver ratings which govern how easily a creature can break off combat and magic resistance for governing defense against magical assaults. Wizards also have these ratings, as well as a magic rating governing how many spells they initially have. Several spells create objects on the board. A player may also receive spells that improve his wizard, such as 'Magic Sword' or 'Shadow Form', or spells that directly attack other creatures, such as 'Magic Bolt' or 'Vengeance'.^[2]

Each (human) wizard takes it in turn to view the board (if desired), examine their spells and select one to cast on the next turn (selecting a spell is not compulsory). Typically, the other human players look away during a spell choice to avoid an unfair advantage. Once all players have chosen their spell, they attempt to cast them in order. Whereas the human players select their spells before each turn begins, the computer wizards actually select their spells during the play stage of each turn. This is not documented, although it becomes apparent in play, as the computer wizards often cast spells that would have required foreknowledge of the other players' actions. Once all spells have been cast, surviving wizards take it in turns to move themselves and any creatures under their control (unless they are 'engaged' in combat), and attack other wizards/creatures.

Other creatures or wizards are attacked by either moving into them, or flying onto them. Moving or flying next to an enemy creature automatically 'engages' them, and allows for an immediate attack. If an attack is successful the enemy creature disappears/dies and the attacking creature moves onto its square. Flying onto a creature allows an attack, but the flying creature remains in place unless it succeeds in killing its target, in which case it takes its place as above. Success depends on the attacking creature's combat rating against the defending creature's defense rating and a certain amount of randomness. Some creatures have ranged combat, allowing them to attack other creatures from afar, so long as there is a clear line of sight. Once all wizards have taken it in turn to move and fight, the turn sequence starts over from the beginning. For human players, no actions are compulsory, they may simply skip any actions they do not want to take. Computer-controlled wizards will always move, unless in a Magic Wood, Castle or Citadel, even when it is not in their best interest to do so. Likewise all computer-controlled creatures always attempt to move each turn. If a wizard is destroyed, all his creations immediately vanish too.

Development[edit]

Chaos was created entirely by Julian Gollop, based on his 1982 design for a traditional card game, itself inspired by the early Games Workshop board game Warlock.^[3] He was an avid card game designer and saw computers as a way of hiding game rules too complicated for pen-and-paper scenarios. Thus the board used in the card game became the tiled map in the video game.^[2]

Reception[edit]

CRASH awarded Chaos 8 out of 10,^[4] praising the neatness of the presentation, efficient sound effects, pleasing sprites and concluding that it was a very good multiplayer strategy game. Criticisms included the sparseness of the initial playing area, lack of status report for the wizards and information on how much damage was being dealt. The reviewer also felt there could have been a wider range of missile attack spells. Sinclair User rated Chaos 4 out of 5 stars, calling it 'fast-moving and colourful' with simple, functional graphics. It was seen to be complex enough to appeal to players of both Dungeons & Dragons and strategy games.^[5]White Dwarf awarded it 7 out of 10, finding particular fun in the spells 'Magic Fire' and 'Gooey Blob' but criticised the poor quality of the instruction booklet.^[6]

Legacy[edit]

In the final issue of Your Sinclair in 1993, Chaos was listed at fifth place of the Your Sinclair Readers' Top 100 Games Of All Time.^[7] In 2006, GamesTM listed Chaos at position 44 of the top 100 games of all time. This made it the second highest rated Spectrum game, behind Manic Miner.^[8]

One of Jagex's early games was Cyber Wars – a browser-based online multiplayer clone of Chaos that switched the fantasy theme of the game for a sci-fi one; it was part of the Castle Games Domain online lobby. Developers of the indie PC strategy game Darwinia cite Chaos as an influence during its early development.^[9]Chaos has also been the subject of many homebrewremakes such as Chaos Funk:^[3][10] Gollop regularly receives requests from people wishing to create remakes.^[3]

In March 2014, Gollop began raising funds for Chaos Reborn on Kickstarter. The project, described as 'part sequel, part re-imagining of [the] original game'^[11] exceeded its target within a month, raising $210,854 out of its $180,000 goal, and was released in October 2015.

References[edit]

1. ^'A History of Chaos'. Archived from the original on 2012-12-10. Retrieved 2012-12-07.
2. ^ ^ab'The Making of Chaos'. Edge (114): 96–99. September 2002.
3. ^ ^abcBevan, Mike (2010). 'Lord of Chaos'. Retro Gamer. No. 81. Imagine. p. 29.
4. ^'Chaos review'. CRASH (16). May 1985. Archived from the original on 2003-06-06.
5. ^Gilbert, John (May 1985). 'Spectrum Software Scene 2'. Sinclair User (38). Archived from the original on 2007-11-05. Retrieved 2008-10-22.
6. ^Mendham, Trevor (August 1985). 'Chaos: The Battle of Wizards'. White Dwarf (68): 13.
7. ^'Chaos: The Battle of Wizards'. Your Sinclair (93). September 1993.
8. ^GamesTM, September 2006
9. ^'Darwinia . Extras . Development'. Archived from the original on 2008-08-30. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
10. ^Dan Whitehead. 'Creating Chaos'. Retro Gamer. Vol. 2 no. 1. p. 51. With its broad scope, but simple design, Chaos was always an obvious choice for homebrew retroheads looking to stretch their coding skills.
11. ^'Chaos Reborn - From the Creator of the Original X-COM'. kickstarter.com.

External links[edit]

• Chaos at MobyGames
• Chaos at SpectrumComputing.co.uk
• Chaos: The Battle of Wizards at Curlie
• A USENET message describing the internal structure of Chaos and naming the missing spells
• Chaos Online, detailed analysis of Chaos and discussion of Chaos Reborn

...It may take many incarnations.
I'm actually going to pause a moment, to talk about a technique I've been using to keep track of the group's movement through the castle.
Curse of Strahd comes with an beautiful full color poster map. On one side is Barovia. On the other is a map of Castle Ravenloft, still in full isometric glory. Now with full color. It seemed a waste to keep that map on my side of the screen, plus, I didn't want to constantly re-draw maps on board every few minutes as the party moved around. So I cut some pieces of construction paper, laid the whole map out of the table, and used the construction paper as a 'fog of war,' covering up areas of the castle they had yet to visit, and removing it as they visited new areas.
And they visited new areas.
Alec's friend Ron was able to return, and he once again played Simon. Since he's a character named Simon with a flail, fighting vampires, we decided that his weakness should be that he can't swim.
First they took a short rest inside a rope trick. It was good that they did, since some flying swords were called for on the random encounter table. Instead they entered the room, found no one there to attack, and left.

This Castle Is A Creature Of Chaos

The characters followed the swords down main stairs leading down from the throne room to a landing decorated with a pair of suits of armor in alcoves. The party were wisely wary of the armor and avoided a minor trap attached to them, then went down the grand staircase leading down from the landing back to the great entry hall. There, they found that the gargoyles decorating the arches were more than just statues: the animated and attacked.

Chaos Creatures Ark

Since their thoughts were still on Strahd (whom Lop was tracking with locate creature

This Castle Is A Creature Of Chaos Movie

), they avoided using spell slots. Gargoyles are resistant to non-magical damage and have plenty of hit points. They don't hit very hard, but when there are 8 of them, they can swarm and cause a problem. At one point Damien Martikov was on the front lines and drew several attacks. We all had a case of the 'derp' and forgot that as a wereraven Damien is immune to non-magical damage from non-silver weapons, and gargoyles' attacks do no count as magic. We caught it quick enough, and the crusty old wereraven lived to fight another day. Here's the key to high level parties: even if their casters are conserving resources, fights merely last longer than they might otherwise. The only one who did use spell slots was Tathora and Van Richten, casting cure wounds on squishier team members that had taken too many hits.
Since Lop knew Strahd was below them and to the southeast, they took the spiral stairs across from the entry to the dining hall down. The stopped at one ten-foot wide, ten-foot tall corridor, but opted not to go down it, because Strahd was still below them.
They arrived in the dungeons, where they were more or less even with Strahd. Lop and Cugel were discussing a plan to get over Strahd's location and then use stone shape to open their own passage. I pointed out that there was 50 feet of stone, well beyond the spell's reach.
Ravenloft's dungeons are flooded with cold, dark water. Blake was scared of alligators. It turns out he should have been scared of something else.
A voice called out for help. Tathora, being lawful good, decided to call back. The speaker identified himself as Emil Toranescu, a citizen of Vallaki chased into the castle by a pack of dire wolves. Since Kyla bothered to take notes, she recognized this character as a quest goal. Specifically for Zuleika Toranescu, the werewolf they made a truce with. After revealing that Zuleika had sent them, Emil said he'd be grateful for the help. Tathora moved towards the sound of his voice, then disappeared in a fountain of rushing water in air. She had been teleported by a deviously hidden trap into a cell to the north.
The corridor is laced with these teleport traps. They teleport whoever steps onto it into one of the northern cells of the dungeon. There, the water is about five feet deep. Eventually Lop, riding on Ap's shoulders, and Sarra got teleported into cells. Lop and Ap tried using thermodynamics to weaken the bars of their cell, granting Simon advantage on a Strength check to pry them off. He still failed.
At this point Emil pointed out that his confidence in the party was somewhat lessened. Because spending an entire night rolling the same check over and over would have been boring, I rolled a d20 and had Amrus successfully pick all the locks in that many minutes. It was 16, so Lop had burned through about a half hour of his hour duration on locate creature.

Fenkenstrain's Castle - The Old School RuneScape Wiki

Castles

In the process, Amrus found a glowing +1 shortsword that also happened to be sentient. It quickly attuned to any lawful good creature and provided added benefits to such a wielder. Unfortunately, the only lawful good party member was Tathora, who isn't proficient with shortswords. They ended up giving it to Amrus, who could still benefit from the +1 without attunement.
They freed Emil, who was mostly interested in leaving the castle and returning to his mate. Since the PCs didn't want to stop him, he left.
Next they found themselves in a torture chamber being overlooked by a balcony. They moved toward the balcony to climb up, when six Strahd Zombies emerged from the water and attacked.
Strahd zombies are bit different from garden variety zombies. First, they have one more hit die and commensurately more hit points. They also have a claw and bite attack and the multi-attack feature, as opposed to the basic zombie's slam.
Those of you who remember way back in the day to Elemental Evil, will recall that zombies have a feature called Undead Fortitude, making them remarkably hard to put down. Strahd zombies have a different feature: Loathsome Limbs, that causes a random limb to separate after the zombie is hit with a slashing or bludgeoning weapon. This changes the way the zombie can fight, sort of. Of course, all the limbs die as soon as the main torso dies. Simon managed to sever an arm, a leg, and head. Still, the zombies were an easy encounter, but it was time to call it a night.
Next time they'll be reaching the Crypts. That should be fun.