• Designers: Geoff, Brian & Sydney Englestein

• Publishers: Stronghold Games

• Players: 2-8

• Time: 60-90 minutes

• Ages: 12+

• Times Played:7 (with review copy provided by Stronghold Games)

Hail and well met, young adventurer! Sit, grab a pint and let me tell you a tale of long ago, of the times of yore… back when Avalon Hill was still its own sovereign kingdom and the only European games any of us knew were Clue and Risk. (Truth be told, we didn’t even know those games were European – we pretty much thought that the Parker Brothers invented them.)

It was the Year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and eighty… the year of the Miracle on Ice, the release of Pac-Man, and the summer that the Empire finally struck back. Those were heady times, my young friend – because it was during that same span of 365 days that many of us stumbled into our friendly local game stores to find a game shaped like a double album. (Ah, double albums – I remember them fondly: Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, ELO’s “Out of the Blue” and the soundtrack from a little film called “Star Wars” were the background soundscape for many an afternoon AD&D session. But I digress…)

Now, this wasn’t the first game that Yaquinto released in the album format – but it certainly is the first that I remember. It was called Swashbuckler – and it was a plotted simov game of Three Musketeer-ish bar fighting.

What? You didn’t understand the word “simov”? You thought I was name-checking Viktor Simov, Russian painter? Bah, youngling, I am referring to the great pre-personal computer tradition of simultaneous movement in board games, usually done by plotting movement and attacks on paper and then resolving them with the other players. (Examples include Diplomacy, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Sniper!, Dreadnought, and Gladiator.)

The game was, even with the plodding nature of simov plotting, riotous fun. You could swing from chandeliers, tip over tables, and wave your plumed hat to distract your foes. The double album format even offered two boards – one was a bar straight from the set of “The Three Musketeers” (the 1973 version, of course… though the ‘93 version has certain charms and nobody will ever choreograph sword fights like Gene Kelly in the 1948 film.) The other board was, of course, two ships close enough for boarding to begin, a la “Captain Blood.”

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