computer camp, Darren, Val, and I entered the computer lab for the first and last ever official Realms II world championship. After some debate, we’d left the final slot open in honor of our fallen comrade rather than replace him with the second-place finisher from his bracket.
We sat down with the charged solemnity of a world-renowned string trio and a nameless feeling, something between pride and anticipatory bloodlust, that verged over into a round of pregame applause—for the finalists but mostly for ourselves, for the game, for the whole summer, for what it had all been for us. But when the applause was over there was still something left to be decided.
I’d always credited Darren with a showman’s instinct, but when the door slammed open every camper in the room turned and then froze. I didn’t want to meet Simon’s eyes. Ten long seconds passed, and then Darren stood and pulled the empty metal folding chair out from the table and gestured for Simon to take a seat. We went through the now-familiar routine of setting keyboard macros and setting starting parameters, the Realms II equivalent of rosining and tuning our instruments. The evening now promised carnage unparalleled. Each of the four of us was the sole survivor of two previous four-person matches averaging six hours apiece, and had watched half a dozen others.
I specced out a bandit kingdom made up of a mixture of humans, elves, and the odd faerie. I planned to lurk in the forest and prey on stragglers while the others slugged it out in the field. Whatever he was doing, Simon took the longest. In the long interval Darren held up two quarters to signal for a Mountain Dew. Val sipped her black coffee. When Simon slapped the return key, all choices had been entered, the lights were dimmed, and war in the realms commenced.
My scouts quickly sussed out the terms of the conflict. Darren’s forces looked like tenth-century Normandy, a tightly controlled balance of aggression and monetary craftiness along with a good deal of careful castle-building.
Val was lucky enough to spawn in a mountainous corner of the map. My scouts reported her walling off a passage in and out, then they stopped reporting at all. My people vanished into the Perrenwood and started swallowing caravans whole. Nice, but I’d be noticed before long.
And Simon’s choices were… eccentric. His entire nation was made up of tiny bands of humans wandering the map. I saw a few of them hack down trees and build a galleon that sailed away before I could catch it. What was he doing? He seemed to have opted out entirely. Maybe Simon really wasn’t a fighter.
I harassed Darren’s militia while he huddled safely behind walls, playing Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. I could bleed him, but once his castles were up they were proving impossible to dislodge. He took land and held it. He had just begun to get cocky again when the gates of Val’s enclave opened and (there is no other word for it) disgorged a horrifying army of daemons that ravaged and blackened the countryside as only the sons of a nation built on profane sorcery and purest evil can. We could practically hear the crackling flames and panicked horses. Castles that a few turns ago looked like permanent chunks of landscape were being reduced to sad little rubble icons, which after a few years blinked into peaceful little grassy icons. One hour in, Darren signaled for another Mountain Dew. I spotted him the fifty cents.
I waited for him to crack, for the weakness to show under his cocky exterior, but two things saved him. He put his king into the field. It was a grave risk, but it was the only thing that would put heart into feudal lordlings who were almost visibly shitting themselves. And on the next turn, the familiar icon of a man with an oversize sword presented itself at Darren’s capital. Legendary Brennan the warrior had joined Darren’s cause.
Gradually, desperately, Darren slowed, stopped, and reversed Val’s advance. But Val had another card to play: Lorac the wizard. Further, it was the rare Inverse Lorac, the tiny wizard drawn in white on a black tile to indicate that this was the sorcerer’s evil incarnation. This was the first game to put three Heroes on the board. I watched from the safety of the forests as a last great war of light against dark was contested.
But when the turn counter reached 446 of