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“Do a friend a favor,” says a promotional card included in the legendary 1979 board game Dune. “If you know someone who has the basic brain power to comprehend Avalon Hill games, then get him to send us this postcard.”

At the bottom of the card, that friend literally has to sign a sort of affidavit: “I swear that I have the necessary grey matter to enjoy your games.”

As a sales tactic, this may be puzzling to modern eyes, but back in the pre-Internet, pre-console days, gaming saw itself as an elite hobby—something only for the nerdiest nerds. Gary Gygax’s Dungeons and Dragons, which was first published five years previously in 1974, had perhaps begun to throw the gates of gaming open to the masses, but board gaming was not a hobby for the many until the mid ‘90s.

In fact, despite the ubiquity of Risk and Monopoly, there was barely a board gaming scene as we modern gamers might understand it. Most of the hobby featured wargames with densely numbered counters moving across hexagonal grids simulating real-world conflicts of the past.

But there were a few bright spots. One of these bright spots was Dune, the cardboard adaption of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel. While it contains many wargame-like tropes, being a battle-heavy game of area control in which generals throw heaps of colored counters to their deaths, Dune was decades ahead of its time. In fact, it invented numerous concepts that wouldn’t be seen again for 25 years and blended them with a subtlety most games don’t manage to this day.

So how did Dune become one of the great “lost games”? And how does it hold up today?

The biggest bomb ever

Dune was moderately popular at the time of its release, and Avalon Hill was persuaded to re-release it in 1984 to coincide with the towering failure of David Lynch’s film adaptation. This, according to an interview with Peter Olotka, one of the game’s designers, did not pay off.

"When the movie was coming out, we convinced Avalon Hill to reissue Dune with a new box cover that had someone who looked like Sting on the cover, along with two expansion sets,” he said in the 2007 interview. “After the movie came out—which was the biggest bomb ever—Dune just stopped selling. It just stopped. That was it, end of story."

After that, copies of the game became increasingly scarce, even as its reputation increased. As board gaming blossomed in popularity, the clamor for a new edition grew. Sadly, the Herbert estate proved reluctant to re-issue a license, forcing Fantasy Flight Games to antagonise purists with its shiny but thematically alien re-brand, called Rex, in 2012.

Used versions of Dune now go for $150 (~£130) on Board Game Geek, while a cursory look at eBay sees unpunched but opened editions on sale for $250—and mint copies go for $600 or more. In short, the game is a collectors’ item unlike almost any other in board gaming—and a friend of mine with considerably more money than sense bought a copy a few years ago. Recently, I played it.

Designed by Olotka, Bill Eberle, and Jack Kittredge, Dune was originally imagined as Tribute, a game set in the early Roman times. When it turned out that Avalon Hill had the rights to Dune, the design team decided to retrofit the existing game, including its innovative battle dials, for the new universe.

Avalon Hill was set up as a wargames specialist, publishing Tactics, the first mass-market game of its kind, in 1958. The company went on to print hundreds more counter-based games, inventing now-staple gaming concepts like hexagonal grids, stacks of units, and even simulations of troop strength and morale.

Between releases of Advanced Squad Leader, Panzer Blitz, and Gettysburg, however, Avalon Hill was also responsible for several seminal non-wargames, including Civilisation, Diplomacy, and Dune. Each one proved a classic, with the first going on to inspire Sid Meier’s incredibly popular video game series and the second launching a million permanent rifts between friends.

Then there was Dune.

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Tom Mendelsohn

Asymmetry on Arrakis

That little promotional card Avalon Hill’s marketing department slipped into every box had it right—Dune is not a game for the faint of heart or the tactically naive. In fact, it’s an unremitting game of diplomacy and betrayal, featuring six completely asymmetric factions competing for control of the desert planet Arrakis. You win, most of the time, by being the biggest bastard at the table.

Knowledge of the book isn’t necessary to play, and there aren’t any spoilers—players are rewriting the plot from the ground up each time. What you need to know is best summarised on the box itself:

Among the countless planets inhabiting the galaxies of the universe is a small and inconspicuous bit of rock and sand known to its inhabitants as Dune. This planet has practically no vegetation and so little water that a man left exposed on its surface will die of dehydration in minutes. Storms with super-hurricane velocity sweep the planet's surface, and giant sandworms who are often over a quarter mile in length devour anything that moves on the open sand. This is the planet which is the only source of melange, a spice which prevents human aging and makes possible the prescient navigation among the stars which is essential for the continued existence of the galaxy's far-flung civilization. Dune is the focal point in a power struggle among the galaxy's most powerful factions. Whoever controls Dune and its spice has the power to rule the universe.

You’re in a battle to control it as one of six factions from the novel: House Atreides, House Harkonnen, the Fremen, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Padishah Emperor. Each of these comes with special rules and starting conditions; some factions are rich, some have powerful troops, one is particularly good at betrayal, and one—the pre-cognisant space nuns of the Bene Gesserit—will win the game if they can correctly guess, at the game’s beginning, the round on which it will end.

Winning is easy: use your troops to take control of three of the five strongholds (or four of five if you have an ally, or all five with two allies) over the course of 15 rounds. Central to gameplay is spice: it’s the currency that lets you move troops, requisition more of them, and revive dead heroes. Movement on the planet is limited to one space at a time, making each decision on where to commit troops from off-world critical. Making things tougher, Arrakis is wracked by a lethal storm that randomly circles the board in a counter-clockwise direction, killing everything not hunkered down in a stronghold.

Each turn, a deck of Spice Blow cards deposits a spice in a different territory, forcing the poorer factions to battle over it. Sometimes, one of the novel’s giant sandworms, the Shai-Hulud, appears along with the spice, leaving an extra layer of destruction in its wake (unless you are the native Fremen, who can ride the sandworms around the board).

Gameplay hinges on the combat, using a system that would be considered state-of-the-art (if thoroughly evil) even today. There isn’t a die in sight; instead, players move units either from adjacent spaces or from off-planet, then uses a combat dial to secretly select how many units to commit to battle—the winner loses only the troops she’s committed, while the loser loses them all.

These risk-reward battle calculations are complicated as players can also add one of their five faction leaders into the fighting. Each of these is a character from the book, represented by a disk that slots onto the underside of the dial and adds extra points to the battle score. The leaders are also entitled to play treachery cards they’ve previously bid on from a central deck—to use a projectile or poison attack or corresponding defences. An undefended attack—say, if one side plays a poison weapon but the other only deploys an energy shield—kills that leader.

To compound the mind games, every player is secretly dealt one leader belonging to someone else; this leader becomes a traitor in that player’s employ. If your foe unwittingly deploys that traitor in battle, they lose instantly, costing them the battle and all their troops—which can usually be regenerated at a rate of one or three per turn. The dastardly Harkonnen have a full four traitors, which makes fighting them exceptionally frustrating.

Conflict becomes a battle of wits and bluffing. I’ve seen victories arise from some truly audacious fake-outs, in which one side has attempted to second guess a weapon choice, only to be double outwitted. I personally learned about traitors and the costs of over-commitment the hard way: in my first game as the wealthy, militarily mighty Emperor, my entire army was wiped out immediately upon planetfall, as my all-conquering general promptly betrayed the lot of them to the Harkonnen on turn one. Troopless and impoverished, I was out of the game for half a dozen rounds as I tried to rebuild my forces. Interestingly, I did return to contention—the game’s natural attrition rapidly left everyone else with military skeleton crews, but I’ve learned that the best way to use the Emperor’s 20 off-planet troops is after everyone else has battered each other into a standstill.

There’s even nastiness in the bidding round. The treachery deck hold five worthless cards, and various other semi-useless ones, all of which must be purchased face down. For those factions not rolling in melange, accidentally bidding on a musical instrument can be crippling, while the Emperor gets to keep the cash from each transaction.