D is for… Dark Tower { Retro Toybox }

Dark Tower

“Dare to lay siege to the Dark Tower!”

Dark Tower was an electronic board game put out by Milton Bradley in 1981.  Playing as a brave warrior knight, with dozens of warrior followers, you faced down marauding dragons, fought evil brigands, haggled with merchants, and explored temples and tombs, all with cool music and sound effects. The game allowed for 1 to 4 players. There was even the option for solo play.

Man did I ever love this game as a kid!  The premise? A tyrant king and his brigands are holed up in the Dark Tower with the ancient magic scepter he has stolen. Three magic keys are required to open the tower. In search of the magic keys you leave home with 10 warriors, 30 bags of gold and 25 rations of food. You have to travel through the other 3 kingdoms to collect the keys and then return to your home kingdom to assault the tower.  The blurb in the instructions reads: “On your journey you will fight battles, be attacked by dragons, lose warriors to plague and starvation, and get hopelessly lost in uncharted territories.”

The excellent art work, on the box, and on the light up squares in the tower really set the mood.

The electronic tower kept track of the number of warriors in your band, and how much food and gold you had. There were no dice. The tower was used to randomizes the events and it also provided sound effects and music.  All pretty amazing for back in the day.

As you journeyed around the board you could:
– visit the bazaar to buy more warriors, food and other player aids, like a scout, or a beast.

– delve into tombs and ruins in search of treasure, chancing losing warriors or supplies, in return for the possibility of finding gold or other treasure such as, the magic keys, helpful wizards, a dragonsword, or the flying horse Pegasus.

– visit the sanctuary when low on warriors, gold, or food to get outfitted with some free supplies.

The locations were 3D buildings which pegged into the board.

Once you had collected the magic keys still needed to “solve the riddle of the three keys”, aka correctly guess what order to insert the keys in – only then could you enter the tower and fight the many brigands within.You needed to have built up your army of warriors, or else entering the tower would just get you slaughtered. At the end of the game your warrior band would face an unknown and random number (somewhere between 17 and 64) of brigands, based on which of the four levels of difficulty you had chosen for play.

 

Dark Tower was an expensive game which was only in print for a very short period of time.  That combined with the fact that the game contains many unique small pieces, and the fact that the electronic tower can break down, has made this a valuable collector’s items for board game lovers.  If you have one of these hidden in the back of your closet you might want to consider pulling it out.  A complete working game can fetch over $200 on eBay and even the individual parts and bits are highly sought after.

You can, however, play this game without forking over big bucks.  There is a flash version of the solo game available on-line, which even includes the original art and sound clips. I cringe to think of how much time I’ve wasted on this flash game. Ahh, nostalgia.