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It contains all the expansions of the Avalon Hill version as well, Spice Harvest and The Duel, and 3 more factions from the General Magazine, The Landstraad, the Bene Tleilaxu, and the House of Ix. You could also order it with an English translation sheet. This item only seems to be available in France now. I personally like the french art far better (for one, it's almost all in color.) Information and write up by Jeremy Fridy |
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From the box: Like all Avalon Hill products, this is now out of print; it is very unlikely to come back into print because of the difficulty of obtaining rights from the Frank Herbert estate. |
A description of the AH version. Essentially, it's a six player game. It is technically possible to play with less, but it robs it of something. My friends and I refuse to play with less than six. The six players each adopt one of the characters/factions of the book: Atreides, Bene Gesserit, Emperor, Fremen, Guild, and Harkonnen. The object of the game is to seize three (or, more commonly, four) of the five strongholds on Dune: Arrakeen, Carthag, Sietch Tabr, Habbanya Ridge Sietch, and Tuek's Sietch. This is done with a combination of economic, military, and religious might, with a strong dose of treachery. The rules are fairly complex for casual gamers (usually I get blank stares when I first introduce someone to the game), but are remarkably simple when you're actually playing a game.
A game begins with everyone tossing all of their leaders (five for each faction) into the middle of the table. Then, everyone draws four at random. Each person then jots down one of the leaders belonging to someone else as their traitor. A traitor will lose a battle for someone if he/she plays it against the person who drew it. I don't think that I phrased that very well, but you probably get the idea. If it's still not clear, imagine that the Harkonnen player drew Dr. Yueh (one of the Atreides player's leaders) and called traitor during an assault in Arrakeen early in the game...
A turn (which involves everyone at the table) progresses as follows: first, the player order is determined by a storm that sweeps around the board a random distance each turn. The storm also kills anything in its path that is caught on the sand. Then, in the second part of the turn, a spice blow happens, placing spice (the currency of the game) on the sand somewhere. This deck (the Spice deck) also contains sandworms, which devour anything on the last spice blow, and trigger a Nexus (more on that later). The next phase of the turn is a bidding round. Everyone gets to bid (blind) on Treachery cards using spice. The Treachery cards are generally items that are useful. These include projectile and poison weapons and defenses, disposable heroes for battles, mystical "Karama" cards that do weird things depending on the character, etc. There are, though, five worthless cards that do nothing, and force you into battle to discard.
The next part of the game is the revival and movement round. Because of the Bene Tielaxu, death is not permanent in the game. Dead leaders may be revived as gholas, either with the Bene Tielaxu Ghola card or for a fee once all leaders are dead. Troops are also revived (everyone has only 20 tokens) at varying rates, depending on the character (1 for the Emperor, the Guild, and the Bene Gesserit, 2 for the Atreides and Harkonnen, and 3 for the Fremen). Additional troops can also be bought, up to a maximum of three revived in one turn. Movement is fairly straightforward: each player may make one shipment and one movement each turn. A shipment is usually from off-planet using one of the Guild's ships. This costs spice. A stack of tokens may then move one space. There are some exceptions here, though. The Fremen ship from the far side of the planet, so they enter the board differently. They may also move two spaces instead of one. And whoever controls Arrakeen or Carthag has access to ornithopters, and may move three spaces each turn.
The next phase of the turn is the battle round. Whenever two players are on the same space, except under certain very rare conditions, they must battle to determine dominance of the space. This battle involves no luck. Each player takes one of the Dune battle wheels, and enters a number from zero to the number of troops that he has. Whatever he dials, he loses. He then places a leader (or a Cheap Hero/Heroine card) into a slot in the wheel designed for that. Each leader has a value from 1 (Guild Representative, Dr. Yueh, Uman Kudu) to 7 (Stilgar). Finally, a player may play two cards. These must be a weapon and/or a defense and/or a worthless card. Each weapon or defense is defined as either projectile or poison. If you play a projectile weapon and I play a projectile defense, then nothing happens. If you play a poison weapon and I play a projectile defense, then my leader dies. The winner of the battle get's the leader's value in spice (for their water), and its value does not count toward the battle. After all of that, whoever has the higher total of troops plus leaders win (unless someone has a traitor).
The last part of the turn is collection. Everyone with tokens in spaces with spice takes some (3 spice per token), and whoever owns Carthag, Arrakeen, and Tuek's Sietch gets a bit of spice in taxes. Then the turn starts over if no one has won.
All well and good. But what sells the game is that each character/faction may break the above rules in his/her own individual way. The Atreides player is able to see into the future. He can look at the next turn's spice card, he does not bid blind, instead looking at each card before it is bid on, and may ask to see one element of an opponent's battle plan (troops, leader, weapon, or defense) before he decides on his own.
The Bene Gesserit is a complicated character. First, she may make a prediction at the beginning of the game, naming a player and a turn. If that player wins on that turn, then the Bene Gesserit player wins instead (that happens about as often as you would expect <g>). The Bene Gesserit also has access to the voice, being able to command someone to play or not play certain cards during battle ("You will play a poison weapon.") Finally, the Bene Gesserit has a powerful and subtle ability to "co-exist". Essentially, if the BG is coexisting in a space, then someone else can go in and not fight her tokens...unless she says that she is no longer coexisting in future turns. The overall effect has been compared to cancer. It just builds and builds until it kills the host.
The Emperor's military might gives him five starred tokens to represent his Sardaukar. These are worth two in battle (except against the Fremen...). And everyone who pays for a Treachery card gives him the money. He is very rich, usually.
The Fremen are the most powerful single faction in the game (this is usually offset by their extreme poverty, at least early in the game). In addition to their high movement rate, free shipping, and high recovery rate, they also get to know in advance where the storm will move, are not eaten by worms, and suffer only half-losses from the storm. They also have three starred tokens for the Fedaykin. These do work against the Emperor.
The Guild, of course, is paid for all shipping that occurs in the game. They also have the ability to go whenever they want during a turn. These abilities might not seem like much, but extreme wealth plus an ability to preempt can go surprisingly far.
Finally, the Harkonnen excel at treachery. Everyone else is limited to four treachery cards, but the Harkonnen can have up to eight. They get this by bidding for one card, and then taking a second card for free, which the Atreides doesn't get to see. In addition, they name every leader that they draw at the beginning of the game as traitors (which is probably why they had Dr. Yueh in the first place; a tip if you ever get to play as the Fremen: don't trust Stilgar unless you drew him yourself). And they get to capture an additional leader from a defeated opponent (Thufir Hawat in the book) to either use in battle or kill immediately for spice.
The last thing to mention is the Nexus. A Nexus permits alliances. When two or more players enter into an alliance (a very common house rule is to only permit two), their tokens now count toward victory together (so if they control four strongholds between them, they win the game). They also get to loan certain abilities to their ally: The Atreides can see his ally's opponent's battle plan, the Bene Gesserit can voice an ally's opponent, the Emperor can loan money to his ally (as can every ally properly; the Emperor's ability usually ends up a "free Treachery cards for my buddy"), the Fremen's ally is not eaten by worms, the Guild's ally gets to ship for half-price, and the Harkonnen's traitors will also betray his ally's opponent.
As I said, it's remarkably complicated to explain, but it plays very well. The only real design flaw is the sudden endings. Typically, about two or three turns in, a worm will turn up, the two people in the lead will ally, and the game will end shortly thereafter. This, as you can imagine, is usually about an hour and a half into the game, but there are exceptions. During the last PM game in this forum (about two years ago now--how time flies!), the game went on for fourteen turns because the Fremen just didn't want to ally with the Harkonnen.
Oh, one last thing. The game can only last for fifteen turns. If, at the end of that time, no one has won, then the Fremen win if certain things happen on the board (mostly that they've kept the invaders from the wild territories). If that doesn't happen, then the Guild wins (they've kept Dune neutral).
AATLEMIDRM
