Pyramid Pick

Elemental

Published by Kenzer and Company

Designed by Greg Stolze

$10.00

Kenzer and Company, publisher of the popular gamers' comic strip Knights of the Dinner Table, and Greg Stolze, co-author of the hit RPG Unknown Armies, have stolen a page from James Ernest's cheap, fast marketing playbook. The result of all this cross-pollination is an entertaining board game called Elemental.

In this game, the four classical elements -- air, water, fire and earth -- play the same roles they do in most popular forms of fantasy: they're primal magical forces getting together and beating the stew out of one another. Forming ever-changing patterns, they battle back and forth until one of them can make the right mystical configuration or overpower all their other opponents.

The fight takes place on a board ten squares by ten squares. Players choose their element, and then take turns placing counters of that substance on the board. The game recognizes several patterns, each with a different effect on the counters on the board. For example, if you can form a square with four counters of your element, that's a Mountain, a pattern that cannot be altered or destroyed. If counters are placed as a triangle, you've formed a Fireball, and any counters the Fireball is pointing at are destroyed.

Other patterns include the Tidal Wave, the Winds of Change, and combinations like the Volcano. Counters may move across the board or be transformed into another element. The names of . . .

This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.

---

Article publication date: July 23, 1999

---

Copyright © 1999 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.