Game designer Arnold Hendrick designed the solitaire fantasy board game Barbarian Prince in 1981. It was called quirky and poorly balanced, and the website BoardGameGeek famously named it the most difficult solo game ever. But many players admit to loving the game, and it won the Charles S. Roberts award for Best Fantasy Boardgame that year. Without reading the rules, a player can win Barbarian Prince on their first turn, but they can also play it through 50 times and never win―and some despise the game for this. But others rave about it and one critic jokingly calls it the Supreme Achievement of Western Civilization. So what is it?
In simple terms, a player takes on the role of Cal Arath, the namesake prince, in hiding after a usurper has killed his father the Old King. He flees to the south where he wanders the treacherous hills and monster-haunted ruins—AKA the game’s hex board—seeking to gather enough gold to raise an army and retake his kingdom. But Hendrick’s design features a whopping 343 interlinked adventure nodes in the accompanying booklet, along with the board, rules, tables, and a metal prince figure, all packed in a very small box. Todd McAulty of Tor.com called it “a huge leap ahead of anything that had been done in solitaire gaming in 1981—represent[ing] an enormous accomplishment.” And he went on to explain:
(It) isn’t just a game in which you wander sterile dungeon halls and fight programmed battles. You recruit companions, flee peasant mobs, explore tombs and dwarven mines, face witches and warrior wraiths, become a fugitive, befriend an eagle clan, join a merchant caravan . . . find true love, and starve to death.
The game’s popularity then led to many spin-off games which utilized Hendrick’s adventure system for other game environments and situations. And solo gamers have kept it alive ever since. Corrected rules are available on BoardGameGeek and the game is obtainable as a print-and-play on several websites. And some new games named it as inspiration. Journey to the Overland advertised itself as “a game inspired by Dwarfstar’s Barbarian Prince” in 2014. Even more obviously, Rocco Privitera designed the game Barbarian Vince in 2012 as a more compact version of a parallel adventure ruled by cards only. During the recent pandemic, Barbarian Prince saw something of a comeback when it was embraced by the Community-Driven RPG crowd, though it’s technically not a role-playing game. They tackled its “soul sucking” difficulty together in online forums. And in 2019, following recent trends toward microgames, Jason Meyer “designed” Barbarian Mints, writing that it was:
deeply inspired by the 1981 game Barbarian Prince, I’ve made this game in an attempt to capture the fun and excitement of exploration, adventure, and wilderness-living: while avoiding a dense book of tables and the somewhat arbitrary nature of the classic 1981 game. All the wonder of exploration, condensed into a mint tin, with only cards, paperclips, and the player’s sense of adventure!
I emailed Mr. Meyer through BoardGameGeek and asked if he had a copy of Barbarian Mints. He said sadly no, he had abandoned the project before completion, but he hoped to revisit it someday. I share that hope!