Lost Worlds

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Lost Worlds - Skeleton with Scimitar and Shield

Lost Worlds is a "combat picture book game" designed by Alfred Leonardi and originally published in 1983 by Nova Game Designs. The game has had many publishers, including Chessex, Emithill, Flying Buffalo and Greysea. In 1984, Lost Worlds won the Charles Roberts/Origins Award for Best Fantasy Boardgame of 1983.
Advance publication notices imply that a minor resurgence in published books may be occurring, with 5 new titles in 2004, a further 2 published in June 2005 (both with photo illustrations rather than graphics) and a further series of books, of emphatically female fighter-types and under the collective title of "Queen's Blade", published from late 2005 by Hobby Japan. These books (currently 8 released and 3 more in production), proved however to be new (hentai-ish) illustrations to existing combat matrices, rather than "new" characters.

The Leonardi move-matrix system has also been "borrowed" by other publishers, notably "BattleBooks" and Games Workshop as the engine to drive their own combat picture book games.

[edit] Gameplay

Each player chooses a character from those available. They take the character sheet for that character and give the character's "visual combat book" to their opponent. The character sheet lists all the combat moves which the character can make. The combat book lists the effects of the attacks in tables.

Each player calls out their move. They then look up their opponent's move in the character book and compare it with their own character sheet; this gives them the effect of the move, including restrictions on next turn's move and any hit point losses. The first character to reduce their opponent to zero hit points wins.

To add complexity (and variety) certain characters have special abilities -- the Cave Troll and the Unicorn, for example, can Regenerate; several characters (beginning with the Fighter-Mage) can use Magic Spells (although there are now 3 different spell systems, formulated by different publishers); several can infect an opponent with either poison or disease, which then cause damage automatically in every round of combat. Some characters can fly; others have magic weapons.

In addition to Magic (represented by cards), there are also cards for Tactics and Luck, with characters having differing access to these, depending on their statistics.