The Most Awesome Wargame: Cry Havoc 

How lucky the kids in USA were with such games being available. I grew up in former soviet union and we could only dream of such things if of course we knew about their existance which we did not.

The hand drawn art really does give a different feel! Thanks for sharing this!

Thank you for this great video. These games are very immersive, because of the great graphic of the counters and boards and the scale of one counter one fighter or assest. It is a pity, that these games are out of print. When I was a young man, I bought one of them (Siege) but unfortunately not the other.

Great video! I used to play this at the Birmingham gaming club at Ladywood back in the 80s Loved it!

Played it yesterday! So much tension, easy to play and realistic rules (modified)...Great game!

Magic of old games. But I still prefer hexes in war games than a ruler. It is make the distance so much more clear and make planning easier without making the game more streamlined.

And in 1987 Standard Games released "Outremer", set in the Third Crusade. Lovely to see the games, I used to see the adverts in magazines back in the day!

These videos (published both here and in your other channel, "Retro Dream") remind me of how many things I have missed due to my young age (20): what a pity! When I was little, I liked board games but I never had the opportunity to find anything similar to the games you show in this channel. Great design and beautiful illustrations indeed! From Ultima to Tolkien's books, Lone Wolf and these board games, I suppose you truly appreciate fantasy, isn't it? :)

Still have mine...and used it (and variations of it) with my history students. Awesome game!

Agree!! Superb wargames, so many hours spent playing them!

you missed the Miniatures adaptation ;) Great Video, one of my all time fav games and brought back all the fun i had with the game. I still have the miniatures rule bookk and the board game maps but the counters have long since been lost :(

Terrific video! fascinating history on Gary Chalk, you are right, he made these games captivating

love this game - to the point that I now also have some of the more recent 'adaptations' by Historic One Editions...

i remember having massive samurai vs knight battles with my friends. Ridiculous but fun.

Some fascinating facts here that I wasn't aware of! I first read The Hobbit in about 1980 and have been hooked on Middle Earth and fantasy since. I live in a run-down city in the north of England called Hull. In 1983-4 me and my friends used to walk down Cottingham Road on Saturdays to visit a Cafe where they had a small selection of arcade games. The walk took us past a university building named the Dennison Centre and I found out 7 years ago that Tolkien began writing Middle Earth lore there while recovering from war injuries! I was utterly blown away. If I had known this as a young teenager I would have just stared in awe at the place and imagined... It also turned out that he had the idea for the tale of Beren and Luthien after watching his wife dance in some woods which are a short distance from here. Me and my brother made a pilgrimage there recently and I swear there was a kind of magic there.

The first of these games I owned back in the 80's was Samurai Blades, bought in the model shop in Kings Lynn, had travel an hour by bus from the village I grew up in to get there . I went on to buy all of them, but by far my favourite was Siege! The rules and the quick reference sheets were great. GREAT video.

Man this is cool. I (13) love seeing videos like this. Keep it up

Me and my brother played Cry Havoc to death lol……we had several expansions as well. We absolutely loved this game. We even played the game using 1/72 scale minis.

Great stuff

I'd wager that Firefly Studios had this game laying around when they were making the Stronghold games! Especially the siege equipment looks suspiciously similiar

We played the hell out of these games back in the 80s. We wouldn't use the scenarios but split all the counters between us. The piles of dead bodies soon became impassible walls. But the rules for crossbows were terrible. The bow rules in Samurai Blades worked a bit better.

I remember saving up to buy Cry Havoc in the early 80's. A friend of mine had the samurai version and we cooked up a scenario whereby all the Cry Havoc characters had gone on crusade, but got sucked into a vortex which placed them off the coast of Japan and decided to have their crusade there. We used all the maps and all the counters. I think we got about 2 turns in before having to stop - the game just isn't designed for big battles like that. 😅

That was a lovely homage to a game you obviously love. Thanks for introducing me to Cry Havoc! Have you played the newer versions from Historic One?

I wish they would still make games like this. I much prefer colored counters that blend into the map rather than grey miniatures that stick out like a sore thumb

Still have the Outremer game, that belongs to that series too

:) Ηello ! This is a legendary war board game !

This game is still supported and published under a different name by Historic One.

Is the a name for this style/form of illustration? I like it, reminds me of old 2000ads Kevin oniell is a good one

I've had this game and Samurai Blades for many decades. Never played either???????????????

I found Siege at a thrift store but got so disappointed when i found out it doesn't have all the pieces😭

Don’t know who currently holds the licence for it but that would make an awesome Deluxe Designer edition reprint on something like kickstarter

Very cosy channel.

This reminds me a lot of heroscape

Cool! How does this compare to a game like Melee/Wizard?

anyone know where i could get a copy? other than on eBay(I only saw one and it was 120$ kinda out of my price range)

Is there a computer adaptation of these games? would be amazing to be able to play online

where can I get my own?

I got everything but only played it once and didn't like it. The big downside of this game is that it is a skirmish game in which a combat between two equally skilled opponents slightly favors the defender.

Combat resolution in that series is absurd. A knight attacking a peasant is more likely to be wounded than his enemy.

I don't understand the combat system and the rule book is a mess :(