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Swampmen was my favorite kingdom from back in the day! Start with six pop centers, lots of troops and wizards, and spread crazy far apart.
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Ry Vor's Swampmen rant:
In 2nd Cycle (long time ago), The Giants were dominant. Then, like the dinosaurs, an asteroid took out the Giants. Also, in a moment of weakness, I went with a friend's suggestion to create the Swampmen, perhaps my biggest failure. The transition from me to Phil running Alamaze in large part had to do with the wretched Swampmen. Steve was running the games while i was pursuing my career and I would check in, and in those days there were file cabinets, with paper files, and folders of requests to be in a game with a certain one of 15 possible kingdoms in a 15 player game. This was the heyday, the halogen days after the Dragon Magazine review, so as many as 1000 positions active. We had a rented apartment and a staff of six to make everything go.
Steve was not very diligent. Turns were being run sporadically, often a week late. This was when a turn was $7.50 and players would wait by their mailboxes for the day's delivery. I don't know if you have seen the movie, The Shining, with Jack Nicholson, when his wife sees hundreds of typed pages of just, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", creepy. That was what it was like when I looked in the file cabinet and saw seven games with 14 players, waiting to be created, some for weeks, all for lack of a Swampman player in each. I don't think I really have a temper issue, but I confess I confronted my well paid manager about this situation, pretty directly. Steve just said, "No one wants to be the Swampman." I said back, "Steve, you are the Swampman in each of those games. Get them rolling."
Anyway, Steve didn't really come around, and Phil loved Alamaze - we would talk for hours on little aspects of the game - and an arrangement was made. His son Patrick came down with a truck and after a day of teaching how to start and run games, he was off to North Carolina with five computers, five printers, hundreds of maps and rulebooks. Understand this was when it took a computer about two hours to process a turn, and about the same time to print it, if you didn't have a paper jam.
OK, sorry for that. Then in 3rd Cycle: The Choosing, the Dark Elves were at the top, loaded with the new concept of kingdom traits. The High Elves had fallen into some disfavor replaced by the Druid, who did quite well, and continues so (conspicuously, which is not a good long-term plan as regards ongoing Alamaze development) but now with two choices for each region, pleasingly there was a balance. The Witchlord had been replaced by the Necromancer, who I expected to be a bit more dominant but wasn't, really. Now we also had Amazons and Nomads, The Tyrant of Gor, the Sacred Order and others. ...
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