Lankhmar (board game)

Description

Lankhmar is a board game for two to four players, each taking the role of a hero from Fritz Leiber's stories: Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, Pulgh, or Movarl. Inside the box is a 22-by-28-inch paper hex grid map of Nehwon, 224 counters, a 12-page rulebook, 45 Geas cards, 45 Reward cards, one six-sided die, and a counter storage tray. At the start, each player randomly receives one of the four heroes, plus eight warriors, several weapon counters, and some combination of horses, boats, or camels.

Setup

Each player also gets one of four citadels at random. To begin, everyone draws a Geas card. If that card has a quest, the player must carry it out immediately, assigning it either to their hero or to one of the eight warriors.

A player's turn has several phases. First, they draw a Geas card, which might be blank. If the card gives instructions from Sheelba or Ningauble—like "Bring a basket of oats from the Grainfield to Ningauble"—the player must send their hero or a warrior on that quest right away. Next, the player moves their counters.

Each unit has a movement rate, but that rate is reduced for every action the counter takes, such as changing or picking up weapons. When a hero finishes a quest from a Geas card, the player draws a Reward card. Some Reward cards are blank; most are useful, but only a few are valuable. After movement and quests, the player may engage in combat.

Personal combat is resolved with a die roll. A counter that gets hit twice is eliminated. If a player loses their hero in combat, they can keep playing with any surviving warriors. To attack a citadel successfully, a player must move more units into it than the defender has there; once that happens, fighting stops.

Optional rules

Optional rules can make combat more complex, add healing, allow a dead hero to be resurrected in their home citadel, or introduce the Sinking Lands—a piece of land that sinks underwater and later rises again. Any counters on that land when it sinks are removed from the game. The winner is the first player to capture all of their opponents' citadels.

Publication history

The fictional world of Nehwon and its city Lahkmar, later spelled Lankhmar, were created in 1937 by Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer while they were students at the University of Louisville. The pair built a large three-dimensional diorama of Nehwon measuring five feet by two and a half feet, using layers of corrugated colored paper to represent different terrains on a square grid.

They designed a wargame called Lahkmar to be played on this map. Games took a very long time, often lasting an entire weekend. Only Leiber, Fischer, and a few friends played it during their college years, and it was never published.

In the early 1970s, David Megarry showed a prototype board game he had created, The Dungeons of Pasha Cada, to Gary Gygax. At the time, Gygax was freelancing as a game designer for Guidon Games and tried to persuade the company’s owner, Don Lowry, to publish it. Gygax wrote to Fritz Leiber on Guidon letterhead, asking for permission to use the world of Nehwon in a companion game to Megarry’s.

Gygax imagined players having overland adventures in the Leiber-inspired game and underground adventures in Megarry’s dungeon game. Lowry declined to publish Megarry’s game, believing the board would be too costly to print, but Gygax and Leiber kept corresponding about using Lankhmar material in a game. After Gygax co-founded TSR and released Megarry’s game as Dungeon! in 1974, Leiber agreed to let TSR base a new board game on the old Lahkmar game from his college days.

Gygax, Robert J. Kuntz, and Brad Stock revised the original game. They changed the square grid of Leiber’s map to a hex grid, which had become standard for wargames. The geography of Leiber’s map was kept, but the new map was much smaller, measuring 22 inches by 28 inches. The combat rules were also updated.

The new game, Lankhmar, was published by TSR in 1976. The front cover art was by David C. Sutherland III, and the rear box cover was blank. Two more printings came out the same year, each with an image of the box contents and a description of the game on the back. While Dungeon! became a bestseller for TSR and saw many new editions over the next forty years, Lankhmar sold poorly and was removed from the TSR catalog after the third printing.

Reception

In Issue 2 of White Dwarf, Fred Hemmings complained that the game had little to do with Leiber's stories, given that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were enemies in this game. He also did not like the use of weapon and transportation counters, which led to teetering stacks of counters for a hero or warrior that was mounted and carrying three weapons. And he found the combat system too reliant on random luck. But he liked the weapon variety, the atmosphere of the game, and the clarity of the rules.

He concluded by giving the game a below-average rating of 6 out of 10, saying The game has its faults [...] despite these and other minor flaws, Lankhmar is a game well worth playing. In the inaugural issue of Ares (March 1980), Eric Goldberg called this a simple, lifeless game that manages to strip the Leiber stories of interest. He concluded by giving the game a very poor rating of only 3 out of 9, commenting, The basic mistake committed in Lankhmar is the design approach: the stories depend on a great degree of uncertainty (or mystery), which is absent in the game.

John O'Neill, writing for Black Gate, noted that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are partners in Leiber's stories, so The objective — to capture your opponents’ citadels — makes little sense in the context of the fiction, but was a comfortable fit with 70s board game logic. O'Neill also noted that Most of the components, including the playing cards and counters, are printed on very flimsy stock. But the map is gorgeous.