Format: Spectrum
Release: 1984
Publisher: Games Workshop
Developer: Julian Gollop

Julian Gollop was always a board game fanatic (“Ever since I was 14 or so”) and Chaos, like his other earlier titles, was based upon his own design for a more traditional card game. He used to design them obsessively and saw computers as a way of hiding more rules in the game: rules that would ‘feel right’ but be too complicated to be worked through in a pen-and-paper scenario, and so would allow for a richer playing experience.

For someone who’s been designing and tweaking these video/board games for over 20 years, the man largely responsible for the successful X-Com series of games, Gollop doesn’t see the point in playing the same rules for too long, and refuses to rest on his laurels: no set of rules is perfect or sacrosanct, no game is too precious to tinker with.

“According to some of my colleagues, and many other people who have played it, this is the best game I’ve ever done,” he once seemed to sigh on his company Codo Games’ now defunct website, recounting Chaos as the fifth in a line of strategy games that he wrote. It’s not a sigh. In fact, when asked in person, he’s proud of the game. “It was definitely the most ardently admired out of everything I’ve done.” But Chaos was actually based on a card game he’d cobbled together out of an early Games Workshop board game called Warlock. “It was kind of a wacky title… we used to play my version of it every Christmas until, well, actually only a couple of years ago. It had a board but the board just seemed pointless… I wanted a map and a sense of location. Chaos emerged out of that card game.”

The rules of Chaos, then: each player represents a wizard and is dealt a number of secret ‘spell cards’ with which to play the game. Every turn each wizard can cast a spell, move their creatures around, and try to attack other wizards on a rectangular board. Spells can create creatures to fight for the wizard (dragons, giant rats, zombies), some can be used to strike opponents directly (lightning bolt, fireball) and others had more esoteric effects, for instance, to mix up all the pieces on the board. (“There was a bug where that one only turned up once in every 64 games, so it’s pretty rare… but that’s probably a good thing.”)

Each spell has a chance of failing. Spells that create creatures can be cast as illusions, which never fail, but other wizards may cast a ‘Disbelieve’ spell on illusory creatures to make them vanish. The wizards take turns to summon minions and set them against each other until only one is left standing.



Although each player starts with 13 spells, some will fail, some will just not be the right spells at the right time and some will only prolong your wizard’s chances of survival rather than be of any direct offensive use. The upshot of this is that the game can never quite degenerate into a fireball-hurling competition because when it can be over in 15–20 turns, every move is significant and must be turned to maximum tactical advantage. But importantly the game doesn't force this on you. The player can play it as a quick blast, hurling the most destructive spells as quickly as possible, and still enjoy the experience against similarly-minded players or lower-powered computer opponents.

Speed was the game’s lure, and soon you found you were plotting your moves more carefully, putting on an illusory air of nonchalance as you wondered that maybe, just maybe if your giant bat could last a turn against your opponent’s green dragon, your wizard stood a chance of acquiring a fireball spell from the nearby Magic Wood and would be able to finish the beast off. These thoughts must have been the tip of the iceberg for an average Gollop family Christmas.