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Christ, knowing it exists but not being able to read it is like knowing of a Jodorosky version of Dune that had Moebius, Giger and Dali, which will never be seen by me.
All because our corporate overlords deemed it to be so. Philistines.
Great review! It breathes life into a venerable, but aging game that often gets overlooked in the contemporary stream of shiny bloated overproduced hyped leviathans. Let's hope that AH's Dune won't be forgotten when the new GF9 Dune game is released along with the upcoming new Dune Movie. I have no hope that the new Dune movie will respect the Dune legenda as Frank Herbert intended in his novels since the current trend in movies is to sacrifice art in order to placate contemporary trends.
I tried to Dune the right thing twice and I played the cheap knock off Rex twice too.
Other than finding 5 other people with the time, you ideally need 5 other people who are really up for it, understand that it is uneven and figure out the power relationships. Three of the games I played finished within 1-2hours, as the first big alliance just won. With repeat play this would iron out.
Dune was always the game I really wanted to be playing, i loved its game space, its cosmic with context but few like minded people exist so I sold my copy on here.
Gary Sax wrote: ^I think Here I Stand, Virgin Queen, and some other big wargames fit in here too. But I'm too stubborn to mail them away to someone.
This. I'm not as much of a fan of Dune as others, mostly because you do need a very committed group to really make it work, which just isn't the definition of a "classic" game to me or even one that's held in very high regard. I've always enjoyed it, but if given the choice between Dune and something like Here I Stand, I'd almost always opt for the latter.
There are two things that Dune does brilliantly that I don't recall seing elsewhere.
The first someone mentioned is the combat system. Deciding how much you are willing to sacrifice to win is so brilliant that it should have been used many times over. It is only Scythe that seems to reuse the combat, and even then the loss you take for combat is not as great as in Dune so that it doesn't feel to be as difficult a decision.
The second is the alliances. With Cosmic Encounter, the designers proved that they understand that one of the weaknesses in multi-player combat games with a single winner is the fragile nature of alliances. By making long running alliances completely binding in Dune and completely impossible in CE they twice managed to resolve one of the biggest problems in game design.
I love the concept of transformation through the "friction" between the rules system and the enactment of the game as a construct between players and their idiosyncratic modes of play. It really does feel like the zone where larger relevance infuses the game without being all that preachy or even intentionally authored at times. We had a similar discussion about this awhile back concerning Root & the approach really paid dividends in this piece of writing.
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