Fifth grade, my dad came home with a treasure-trove. He had  somehow gotten to be friends with a guy who was making a book-based-air-combat game (this is what people in search of gaming did before there was a computer in every home, folks) involving complex rules and charts. He had already designed a series of them; ACE OF ACES,  which pitted WWI era bi-planes in dogfight combat against one another. To look at them, they seemed to be some sort of cartoon flip-book at first; each page was a different illustrated line-drawing view of a skyline, from a vintage era cockpit.

The bottom portion of each page was an imposing matrix of numbers in a chart with byzantine symbols denoting aerial maneuvers. Each book represented a plane. The idea was that, by way of a series of exchanges of information between two players who cross-referenced a chart after declaring their moves to one another, a quick consulting of the matrix would tell each player what page they should turn to to show the end result of those moves. It was, in essence, an analog computer flight and combat sim. This guy,  with his company NOVA designs, was looking to get specs and information about the A-10 Warthog fighter-jet for a more modern version he wanted to create.

My dad was the PR and Audiovisual head of the Connecticut Air National Guard base in Bradley, which was an A-10 fighter unit. And, way back in his day, he also used to play hex-based strategy war games with hundreds of tiny little cardboard chits. So when this game-design guy came calling, he became fast friends with him.

The guy casually mentioned that he also developed a book-based melee  game with fantasy characters, but it is much simpler and not half as cool as the plane stuff. My dad said that his son (i.e. me) loved that stuff and so he gave my dad a full collection of all them for free.

This was like real-life magic, coming home to find these waiting. My father and I sat at the dining room table that night and figured out how to play. The game was brilliant; each thin book ( smaller than a comic book, but with around 60 pages) had its character in various poses, postures and attacks and came with a nicely produced little character move-sheet. What you did to play was hand your book, the one with your character, to the person you were playing against. He did the same. So what you were seeing then, was a first-person view OF your opponent, while you kept your move-sheet/character sheet.  You decided on your move and turned to the page number your move sheet noted for that move, your opponent did the same. The magic then happened by each person telling the other what page they had turned to, and cross-referencing it by way of a little spreadsheet of numbers at the bottom of the page, which told you in turn what page to go to to see how those two moves resolved against each other. That sounds terribly arcane and hard in explaining but in practice it was no harder to learn than the rules to any board game or card game.

The amazing thing was, they were all interchangeable; anybody could fight anybody. There were goblins with heavy maces and knights in armor, an arabian dude with a special move who could throw a dagger, a skeleton who could, as his special move, retrieve pieces of himself to restore lost health. There was even a NINJA and a SAMURAI.

Dude. Fighting as a ninja, against a giant goblin? I’m thirty eight years old this May and that idea still gets me giddy. If that was a movie, I’d go see it on opening night.

After a few hours of play, you began to realize that the what was going on in the guts of the matrix of the system was a series of interconnected “rock/paper/scissors” devices, where this move would beat that or produce this or that result. But it was handled in such a smart way, with clever modifiers or limitations for each different character that it really was a game of skill and strategy.

I still have them all; they sit up in our bedroom on a shelf as mementos,  but good luck finding another nerd (and the time) to play them.

Well, anyway, I had a recent bout of nostalgia and I thought, “You know, if you think it, someone on the internet has probably done it. I wonder if somewhere, some other nerd, more skilled than I, has created a single-player, AI-based online java-based version of these things. Such a thing should exist, so it probably does.”

And lo and behold, one trip to Google later and the internet provides.

Or at least, the fine folks at the site Flyingbuffalo.com do.  This applet requires a recent version of the Java plug-in, but that’s free if you don’t have it already. The applet here has a pretty good sampling of different characters,

Some of the best nights of my childhood with my dad were spent head to head, announcing page numbers to one another, pitting different foes against each other and finding out the various strengths and weaknesses of each.

Check it out, if such things appeal to you. I have an X-box 360 and all manner of super-omega-ultra-polygon-based games for it… but since finding this online gem, I have played it more than I have picked up a controller.