En Garde!

En Garde! is a swashbuckling hybrid game, part role-playing game and part strategy.[1] The game is set in 17th century Paris where players take the roles of gentlemen duellists. The game was designed by Darryl Hany, Frank Chadwick and Paul Evans and first published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1975.

This article is about the role-playing game designed by Frank Chadwick. For other uses of the term, see En garde (disambiguation).
En Garde!
En Garde! 4th edition cover
Designer(s)Frank Chadwick, Daryl Hany, John Harshman, Loren Wiseman
Publisher(s)Margam Evans Limited
Publication date1975 (1st edition)
1977 (2nd edition)
1988 (3rd edition)
2005 (4th edition)
Genre(s)Historical
System(s)Custom

History

Game Designers' Workshop got into the RPG field with En Garde! (1975), published as a 48-page digest-sized book in 1975, with a revised edition in 1977.[2] David M. Ewalt, in his book Of Dice and Men, commented that En Garde! was one of the first early competing products in the role-playing game field to TSR's Dungeons & Dragons, describing it as "a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasized man-to-man sword fighting. Players responded to the Three Musketeers-style setting, but they didn't care for the rules."[3]

In the 1980s the game had become widely played by mail but GDW did not reprint it when stocks were exhausted. Theo Clarke and Evans ran a game for over 20 players at the UK Gamesfair in 1983. Evans then wrote a BASIC computer program to administer the game and they ran increasingly large games at successive games fairs. Evans started a postal game using the same computer programs in 1986 in a new magazine called Small Furry Creatures Press, which he co-published with Clarke. Evans continues to run this game as Les Petites Bêtes Soyeuses.[4] The success of the game also led to an annual convention which ran for over ten years.

Clarke and Evans found a demand for the rule book arising from their games and other postal games. Under the name SFC Press they intended to publish a new edition of the game under license from Chadwick. When SFC Press was liquidated in 2003 the rights to the game were acquired by Evans personally. Evans' company Margam Evans produced a new edition, the 4th, of the game.[5]

Although the 1987 Swedish product En Garde! by Ragnarök Speldesign is also a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasizes fencing, it has no connection to this game.[6]

Reception

In the inaugural issue of Games International, Richard Ashley reviewed the republished edition by Small Furry Creatures Press, and was impressed by its improved layout, as well as the new chapter on postal play. He concluded by giving this game an above-average rating of 4 out of 5, saying, "This new edition retains all the old rules with a superior presentation."[7]

References
  1. Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. p. 53. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7.
  2. Schick, Lawrence (1991). Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games. Prometheus Books. p. 266. ISBN 0-87975-653-5.
  3. Ewalt, David M. (2013). Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It. Scribner. p. 107. ISBN 978-1-4516-4052-6.
  4. http://www.pevans.co.uk/LPBS/index.html
  5. http://www.engarde.co.uk/history.html#Top
  6. See Ragnarök Speldesign
  7. Thornton, Jake (October 1988). "Role Games". Games International. No. 1. pp. 39–40.
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