If you wanted to claim a square for your own, you had to fight for it, and here's where that gets done.

Gone, but not forgotten.

These days, it's not too common to find people who remember the classic title Archon. It had a pretty small following at the time that hasn't grown much since then. However, there are a few places where the Archon influence has cropped up. LucasArts' Wrath Unleashed is considered by many to be a spiritual successor to this classic strategy title. More directly to the point, a small group of developers have been devoting their evenings and weekends to creating Archon Evolution, a modern port of the classic game, featuring online playability. If the project is ever finished, it should be an excellent opportunity for people who missed it the first time to check out this outstanding title.

The struggle over power points added a lot of strategy to Archon.

The very start of the game is the first--and really the last--time that the game will resemble chess.

The year was 1983, and the industry was still trying to recover from the failure of just about every home gaming console. Computer-based gaming persisted in a sense, on the Commodore, Apple, and Atari computing platforms, and although much of the software shared between the three was pretty lackluster, there were a few outstanding gems, and Archon was one of them.

For those who don't remember it, or missed it altogether, Archon was touted as an action strategy title. It placed two opposing sides on a 9-by-9 grid of black and white squares, much like chess. The gimmick of Archon was that you couldn't take a square just by moving onto a square occupied by an opposing piece--to claim it, you had to fight for it. Moving onto such a square transposed both pieces into an arena, where the two could sort out their differences with swords, spears, stone gazes, flaming breath, fireballs, and the wails of a banshee, until one emerged victorious and claimed the square for his or her own. The two sides, light and dark, carried different yet similar pieces in each of their ranks--the light side used sword-wielding knights as foot soldiers, while the dark employed club-carrying goblins. Most of these oppositions were pretty balanced, though one side, oftentimes the dark, employed speed and frailty over the sluggish brawn of the light side. Each side also had a spellcaster--the wizard on the light side and the sorceress on the dark. One spellcaster could fly, while the other marched, allowing them different passage about the board. They could cast a number of spells, teleporting their own pieces around the board, summoning elementals to aid in the battle, or reviving fallen pieces.

While all these aspects made the game good, what made the game great was its sense of strategy. The concept was pretty simple--dark pieces were stronger on black squares, light pieces were stronger on white squares, and both sides recovered from previous battles faster on a square of their corresponding side. Most of the squares throughout the game were static, but a number of them shifted from light to dark, gradually, on a regular interval. The game was won in one of two ways: You could either wipe out each of your enemy's remaining pieces, or you could place your pieces on all five of the board's "power points"--squares on the board that were immune to magic. Because the majority of these were on the squares that shifted, it was easy to twist the game to your favor in a few moves and with some skillful combat.

In short, Archon was just a clever, unique game. The combat, while sometimes clunky, provided a satisfying tension, even when two fairly matched pieces met with equally favoring skills. It was easy to pick up and play, and the strategic elements of the game rewarded longtime veterans of the game. While the different computing platforms it could be found on displayed different levels of production values, Archon offered the same great gameplay on every platform and continues to stand up to the test of time, making Archon easily one of the greatest games of all time.

In the first year or two that I owned it, Archon was a game that had me thoroughly hooked. I played it nearly every day, played it against my family (usually my sister), and invited friends over to play it, and when no one else was around, I played against the computer AI. My devotion to Archon was so strong that I saw school time cutting severely into my Archon time. My resolution to this problem? To write a straight-faced letter to my school principal extolling the intellectual and strategic virtues of this fine piece of software, in hopes of having it available to play in our school computer labs. My letter, regrettably, never saw a response.