Powerplay: The Game of the Gods - Atari ST "Defeat all challengers!"

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Village Monk's Gaming Memories

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Published on October 10, 2015 1:57:43 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JJkomQ8yHo

Game:

Powerplay: The Game of the Gods (1986)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 46:33

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6

Powerplay: The Game of the Gods is a console board game from 1987 made by Arcana. There were also versions of it for the Amiga and Commodore 64. It's only recently that I realised that this was a fully boxed released when I noticed a copy of it on ebay. Apparentely it came on two disks originally. I say this because the version that I am playing here is from a coverdisk of ST Review magazine and it comes on one floppy - maybe that's why there's no title screen, because they had to cut it out to preserve disk space. It would be interesting to see what the difference between the 1-2 disk versions are though.

So the game plays like a version of chess with each player having four warriors with the idea to be the last God with any pieces left. On each move you will have a chance to move your warrior by answering a random question. The quicker that you get the question right, the more points that you score. When your character has reached around 25 points they have a chance to mutate into a mythical beast. For instance a caveman morphs into Atlas, then a Cyclops, before becoming the strongest opponent in the game in the form of the minotaur. You do this to make your character stronger during the one-on-one death challenges and also essentially gives them a free life, if they die as a mutation then they revert back to their previous state rather than disappearing off the board.

Challenging your opponents pieces happens when the rival opponents are facing each other and thus your are teleported to a different stage where you have to answer more trivia questions usually over a molten lava pit, under the gaze of the gorgon or pushing a heavy stone on a high mountain. The loser gets a gruesome death (or demutation). These challenge sequences althrough entertaining aren't exactly perfect. If you are playing against the computer like me, if you try and challenge my Atlas with a strength of 15 against the angel like Iris with a strength of 12, you can literally just sit back and refuse to answer any of the challenge questions. If you do this because you have the strongest character you will automatically win the question, three unresponded questions later and you will have won. It only becomes a problem when you have to deal with the Minotaurs because there's nothing stronger than 25 strength, so you actually have to beat them fair and square.

It's also not got the largest database of questions in the world, after two playthroughs, I did start seeing the same questions over and over again (sometimes in quick succession), which makes repeated playthoughs somewhat pointless if you can remember the answers. But overall it is fairly enjoyable, especially since it was a cover disk and therefore didn't cost anything.

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