In which MetalJim discusses one of the “Holy Grails” of eBay boardgame hunters, the Avalon Hill classic Dune.

For starters, take a quick glance over to Ebay to see the status of an auction like this one, featuring the original 1977 version of the Avalon Hill Boardgame based on Frank Herbert’s Dune series.  You will see that the “buy-it-now” for this game is near $100.  If you want a copy of the game still in shrink wrap, be prepared to pay over $150 (and I don’t really believe that the shrink wrap is original).

The boardgame in question is rated the #42 best game ever over on Boardgamegeek.  Read all about it at BGG, link here.  So, just what is the big deal?  It’s not just obsessive Frank Herbert fans pushing up the price.  It takes some strange combination of collector value and groupthink for this kind of pricing and over-rating to take place.  Can a boardgame from 1977 really be that good?

I am writing about Dune this week because I just had a chance to play an original 1977 copy at my monthly board game meetup.  Conditions were favorable.  We had five reasonable enthusiastic players, and the guy who was teaching the game (it was his copy) had just been re-reading the rules.  I myself had played the game at least twice, but those sessions were back in 1992 or so, and I didn’t really remember very much.  We left out a lot of the advanced optional rules in the interests of a quicker and cleaner game.  So, how well did this 1977 classic hold up?

The answer is not especially well.  Oh, the game is still playable.  It is fascinating in the history of boardgames, because it does include a number of mechanics that would go on to be re-used during the Eurogame revolution of the last ten years.  Still, it doesn’t come across anywhere near as smoothly as something like the board game version of A Game of Thrones (BGG link here) which is a similar type of game that feels much more polished by modern standards.

Some of the factors influencing the experience are aesthetic.  The tokens that represent your “armies” on the board are made of fairly flimsy cardboard.  The cards are low quality, with only 2 colors.  The board is not attractive at first glance, and some of the territories are really too small for the amount of pieces that they end up having to hold.  It is sort of cool that each player gets a little fold-together “lunch box” with the special rules for your particular faction printed on the top.  You use your little box to hide your spice (money) tokens and your remaining leader tokens.  However, the art on the original 1977 player screens is pretty cheesy.

As someone who is used to more modern game designs, the pace of the Dune board game leaves something to be desired.  The first few turns of our game were mostly building phases, with very little interaction between the players.  There was some auctioning of “treachery” cards, but the drama of those auctions felt weak given that only 1 player had any knowledge of what sort of cards were up for bid (based on the Atreides special power).  A couple of players were lucky enough to have a “spice blow” happen within reach of their troops, but in several cases those troops were swept away by dust storms as soon as they finished harvesting the valuable spice. 

As the game wore on, we did get into a couple of big combat situations.  This is really the memorable part of the game.  You see, in Dune, combat happens when you have two stacks of tokens competing for the same province on the map.  The two players each pick up a combat wheel, select a leader, decide what cards to play, and then “dial in” the number of casualties that they want to take.  In other words, I may have 8 guys in a battle, but I have to decide how many of those guys will die EVEN IF I WIN.  That’s my real combat strength for the battle.  Leaders add quite a bit to your combat strength (equal to somewhere between 2 and 7 army tokens), but they can be assassinated on the battlefield by special cards.  It gets even more fun when the Sisterhood of the Bene Geserit are involved in the battle.  Though very weak militarily, the sisterhood gets to make telepathic suggestions to their enemies at the start of a battle.  If the Bene Geserit player says to you “Don’t use a projectile shield in this battle” then you know very well that your leader is about to be killed by a projectile weapon.  You can get some pretty good bluffing and “A-Ha!” moments as players reveal their combat wheels and figure out just who won and who lost and how bad the casualties were.

As our game developed, the casualties were indeed hideous.  The clone banks, where “dead” tokens go to regenerate, were bursting at the seams.  Now, as the trade guild player, I had 20 tokens at the start of the game, just like everyone else.  I made some income early on from a spice blow, and I was able to transport a large army onto the board in an effort to take over a second city from the Atreides player.  After a couple of battles, I was left controlling one city with the rest of my guys in the clone bank.  Those guys would eventually regnerate, but it was going to be a slow and expensive process.  This is a game where you can, in effect, blow your load on the 3rd or 4th game turn, and then be on life support for the rest of the afternoon.

Now we get to the real problem with the playability factor of the game – the Alliances.  The “diplomacy phase” of the game only happens when a “great worm” card comes off the spice deck, so it only really happened twice in our game.  Each time, the alliances had a lot more to do with the 2 most powerful players teaming up just to be able to claim three cities and end the game faster.  This was not just one player’s idea - no one was having enough fun to really want to prolong the game or play for an individual win.  I was able to team up with the Fremen player during the first alliance phase, but this cause the other 3 players (Harkonnen, Atreides, Bene Geserit) to form a 3 player alliance to try and stop us. 

The combined special powers of the 3 way alliance were indeed devestating.  The Fremen player and I failed to complete our win.  The rest of my armies were entirely blown off the board when the Harkonnen player and the Bene Geserit conspired to force me to blow up my own city in a Lazer Gun accident.  Then we had another alliance phase, in which myself and the Bene Geserit were left to rot in the cold while the other 3 players claimed a hollow victory for themselves.  No side had more than 5 tokens on the board at the end of the game, and no one was entirely excited at the result.

I have no doubt the game would improve with a few more sessions, as players become more familiar with the pace of the game.  As the guild player, I know that I would hold my troops back longer, waiting for an opportunity later in the game to sweep in and take control.  However, waiting patiently through 2 hours or more of gameplay is not something that I do well, and not really much fun.

Again, some of the mechanics seem clunky by modern standards.  The card auction takes too much time to play out for what it accomplishes.  It’s frustrating because some cards are specifically “worthless”, and you can’t discard cards unless you use them in a battle.  Some of the special “rules chrome” adds to the thematic feel of the game, but the rules also creates a lot of chaotic special circumstances which usually lead to someone’s troops dying in horrible ways.   There are some “charity” and “catch up” mechanics built into the game, but it can still be pretty unforgiving for a player who suffers massive military losses during the mid game.

Thus, I’ve had my nostalgic experience.  I got to reconnect with a board game that I remember thinking was fairly cool and even somewhat ahead of its time when I first played it 15 years ago.  All the same, there was nothing to make me feel as though I needed to spend $100 to get my own copy of the game.  Oh, I know that there is some geek credibility involved in having such an acknowledged classic on the game shelf.  It’s one of those things that you preserve for the historical value alone.  However, when it comes to how I want to spend my gaming hours in 2007, I can think of lots of better ways to enjoy my afternoon.

Anyone out there willing to step out of the shadows and tell me I’m wrong?  Is Dune the boardgame really worth its price on eBay?