Dark Tower

One of the first adventure board games to utilize an electronic component was Dark Tower, released in 1981 by Milton Bradley. The basic concept of the game was simple. Players would take their characters through four very similar regions, looking for three keys to the dark tower. Along the way, they would assimilate an army for the final attack on the tower. Each region had several spaces of note, including the Bazaar, Frontier, and Tomb. The main strategy was to have enough troops to fight the brigands, have enough food to feed the troops, and have enough gold to buy troops and other things at the Bazaar, which would aid the player. Once the three keys were collected, the player would build his or her army large enough to be able to conquer the brigands in the dark tower, which was usually a sizable force.

The best feature of the Dark Tower board game was unquestionably the tower itself, which ran on batteries, and provided simple graphics and eerie (yet, now comical) sounds. The tower was also an electronic game-master, determining how many creatures a player might encounter, how the battle would unfold, and most other random functions. Copies of Dark Tower with working towers are very rare, and can be quite expensive to purchase.

Combat was usually weighted heavily in favor of the player. Each time a player lost a turn of a battle, they would lose one or two units from their army. However, each time the brigands lost a battle round, they would lose up to half of their forces. Only through fighting many battles and enduring the other tricks and traps of the game was the conquest made challenging to the player.

As an alternative to the hard-to-find original board game, there is a flash version of Dark Tower which is quite faithful to the original.