“We need to talk.” Weldon looked worried. I’d met him at the airport to help him schlep his luggage back on the BART train from Oakland.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “They asked me to review this game they want to buy.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“It’s a card game,” Weldon said, “and I don’t know where to begin.”
“That bad?”
“They swore me to secrecy,” Weldon said. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone…”
I looked at him. He shrugged. We’d long ago decided that if someone didn’t want both of us to know something, they shouldn’t tell either one of us anything. We shared one brain, and they bloody well knew it. But nevertheless, we always acted like we weren’t going to tell the other person and then that was the first thing we always did.
“They want to know what I think,” Weldon said.
I didn’t have to ask. I could tell. It was bad.
Here’s what happened.
Don handed Weldon two decks of cards and the rules to Banemaster, an exciting two player game that lets you explore dungeons, avoid traps, fight monsters, and win the treasure of your opponent, who is trying to do the same thing to you. If you are thinking to yourself, “Hey, that sounds kinda like the description for Wiz-War…” you’re not wrong. The two games couldn’t have been more different in execution, but otherwise, kinda similar in theme.
The rules specify that there’s two decks—the adventurer deck and the banemaster deck. When you’re fighting off your opponent, you use the banemaster cards. When you’re trying to grab treasure from your opponent, you use the adventurer cards.
You play cards out of your hand and pump up their values with weapon cards and spell cards and so forth. There are power cards, too, that add attack and defense numbers to your traps and things. Play is quite lackluster; there are no inventive combos or clever gambits. Just throwing numbers at other numbers. It worked, more or less, but there was nothing to it, really. No strategy, no skill, and no real point. Then there were the cards.
The artist was a woman named Jamie Grant (not to be confused with the man named Jamie Grant that inks a lot of Frank Quitely’s pencils), and insofar as I can find, this was her first professional gig. She has gone on to do fine art and concept art for video games like Lemmings, and you know, I guess you gotta start somewhere, but did it have to be here? And now? It’s not that the artwork isn’t evocative, in its own unique way, and it’s not as if it’s the worst art ever produced in the gaming zeitgeist, but we were comparing it with the artwork on Magic: The Gathering cards, and these pieces came up very short by comparison.
Even if the overall quality of the art hadn’t been so crudely rendered, the subject matter would have been a bridge too far. But together? Here’s the thing: had I seen any of that artwork at the age of 10 or 11 when I was getting into Dungeons & Dragons, I’d have been all over it. Exploding heads, arrows through the face, beheadings… For a kid that was into sword and sorcery and Conan, it was pitch perfect. But Banemaster was ostensibly aiming for an all-ages tone and the simplistic and uncomplicated game play meant that was an intentional design choice.
Despite the childish and almost-comical amounts of violence and gore, a few gems stuck out from the feverish, ramshackle card art. This was our favorite Marauder card by a considerable margin. It’s not great art, but it’s still brilliant anyway. Mad Vampire Sheep? What the hell? That’s the kind of thing you look at and instantly wish you’d come up with it. We considered ‘porting the Mad Vampire Sheep into Wiz-War: Chaos Keep as a monster to summon along with the Feral Chickens and Frankenstein’s Cow to protect your loot.
When the heads of Chessex reconvened for the report on this product, Weldon didn’t mince any words. “I recommend we stay away from it. It is not good and won’t sell well on the market.”
This did not go over well. After some blank looks, he was informed that they had already invested a large sum of money into the game. Weldon’s response was something along the lines of “Then why are you asking my opinion now?”
Someone at the table asked Weldon exactly what was so bad about the game, and he said, “The rules are juvenile and boring, and the art is childish and it’s not what the market wants.”
He was asked what could be done to make the game better. “I have two suggestions,” he told the assembled. “The first thing I’d do is to scrap this artwork and this card design and get a better artist and redo the cards completely.”
After more shocked looks, he was informed that the cards were already printed, and we are stuck with them. “What is your other suggestion?” they asked.
“My other suggestion would be to completely throw out the rules and re-write them so that the game is more engaging.”
“We can’t do that,” someone said. “The rule book has already been printed, and inserted into the sealed decks.”
Weldon’s blood pressure rose about ten points. “Okay, I’m really confused as to why you are asking my opinion at this point.”
Don spoke up. “So, your two recommendations are to rewrite the rules and redo the cards completely? Why don’t we just make our own game at that point?”
“Hey,” Weldon said, “now, that’s a great idea, Don.” That did not go over well, either, which is a mystery because Weldon was smiling when he said it.
“We can’t,” Don said. “We’ve already invested in the game. Pallets are sitting on the dock waiting on us to ship them over to the US.”
Oh, shit.
And there we were. Chessex had a card game now, and it was rubbish. I remember us being furious and taking out our frustrations on our boss, Fitz, who usually just listened to us until we calmed down and then sent us on our way. This time, though, he had a few words that were galvanizing and brought us up short. “It’s Don’s company,” he said, after we’d talked ourselves out of breath.
And he was right; Don could do what he wanted with his company and his money, and our job was to put some lipstick on whatever pig he brought home from market. Weldon had already proven he could find money in dead stock, and I’d not embarrassed the company with a simple spelling mistake (yet!) and whatever else people might have thought about us or our ideas, we had to play the hand we were dealt. In this case, literally. This was just more of the same, right?
Our frustrations aside, some part of our rant must’ve gotten through, because soon after we were informed that the creator of Banemaster would be flying in from Scotland to talk to us about the game and work with us to address some of our concerns. We wondered just how much could be addressed with the components already printed, but hey, it was something.
A few weeks later, we were introduced to Alexander Duncan (“call me ‘Sandy,” he insisted) and he was very charming and charismatic. We got to know him a bit in the few days he was in the Bay Area, and found out that, among other things, he was a practitioner of Pencak Silat, an Indonesian martial art, and a lot of other chitchat I’ve jettisoned in the intervening years. He was very personable, and he listened to our recommendations graciously. We were able to get a couple of concessions from him.
However, when we asked for a complete list of the cards, we were told there was not one. Why? The answer was simple: Sandy didn’t know how many different versions of some of the cards there were. There were no common, uncommon, and rare cards in Banemaster—a concept that was already well-established—there were just…cards. Some of the monsters had three or four variations to their stats. A couple of the weapons are different. There’s even a couple of misprints, the wrong names on the wrong cards. Whoopsie!
No card list? There wasn’t a spread of common, uncommon, and rare cards. At least, not deliberately. See, some of the cards were repeated on the sheets because there were holes to fill and Sandy just plugged them, willy nilly, with no thought to rarity or having a master checklist, which is a thing that makes collectible card games, you know, “collectible.” When Sandy told us that, Weldon actually physically threw up his hands in the meeting.
The rules would be re-worked and reprinted, and someone in Edinburgh would have to open every box, take out the old rules, put the new rules in, and reshrink/reseal every deck box. I’m stunned that they agreed to do that. Sandy was insistent on giving us credit for the changes to the rules. We didn’t want that credit, so we jokingly/not jokingly asked to be listed as “the high potentates,” because no one would know what the hell that meant and we could slip the issue if it ever came back to haunt us.
Not Enough Lipstick
When the cards arrived, it was on us, the Mark and Weldon Show, to come up with a way to sell these boxes of regret. This was the brilliant plan: Don had decided that the various distribution warehouses would be automatically shipped a pallet of each, starters and boosters, and they were on the hook to sell them to get their money back. This would pay back the initial investment and theoretically give Chessex Manufacturing some operating capital to do things like buy hardwood chess sets from India and oh yeah, pay its employees.
We were not thinking that far ahead. We had two major concerns: how to help distribution somehow sell as much of this card game, now called Banemaster: The Adventure, because in the 1990s, we loved our colons and our subtitles, and how to hang on to as much of our dignity and professional reputation as possible. We were booked to appear at all of the distribution warehouses’ Open House events, flinging cards, shaking hands, and kissing babies. The powers-that-be were counting on us to move some product. We knew that there was no help for it. This wasn’t some diamond in the rough that just needed a signal boost. This was a simplistic, lackluster game that looked for all intents and purposes like someone trying to cash in on the CCG craze.
Weldon had had some luck with mailing products to game reviewers in the past. So, he tried it again, with a twist: Weldon wrote some rules to turn Banemaster into a drinking game. There were certain plays you made that forced your opponent to drink. Anytime certain cards, like the Mad Vampire Sheep, showed up, take a drink. Lose a treasure, take a drink. And so on and so forth. Weldon also included a bottle of Shiner Bock in every reviewer’s box. Nothing worked, and no one reviewed the game, which was probably for the best. I don’t think an envelope full of twenties and tens could have elicited a favorable review.
We made it clear that at all of the open houses, we’d be demo-ing Banemaster: The Drinking, hoping like hell we could make the game seem more fun. The various distribution warehouses were taciturn and tight lipped, but the people at Chessex Southwest, our friends? The people we knew and loved? Yeah, they ripped right into us. “What the hell is this shit?” they wanted to know. We told them what we could, and then we quietly told them what we could not: this wasn’t our call, we had no control, quality or otherwise, and we were being railroaded. They threw up their hands, too. Welcome to the party, y’all.
To this day, I am convinced that the reason why we sold those initial boxes of cards was because of our dog and pony show at the Chessex Open Houses. It was exhausting, made even more so by the fact that we didn’t want to do it.
All of the Chessex Warehouses ended up with half-pallets full of Banemaster cards for years. I don’t know what happened to them. They didn’t sell, drinking game rules or no. Worse than anything, someone in the upper echelons of the company (a lickspittle we used to call “Muppet Head” because he permed his thinning hair into a puffy, kinetic mess that would have only looked good on a Fraggle) suggested at a meeting that the reason Banemaster tanked was because “Mark and Weldon didn’t support it.” Everyone else at corporate was only too happy to swallow and repeat that line of bullshit, because then no one had to tell Don he was wrong to have bought the game in the first place. The end was nigh.
Three Decades Later
When Weldon and I occasionally tell war stories about our Chessex Days, Banemaster always comes up. It no longer pisses us off, but for a long time, it still did. We get upset about it because this was the thing that spelled doom for us in California and also Chessex as a company. When Don backed Banemaster, it officially killed our CCG project. That our game was flattened by an inferior version of the same idea was all the more galling.
A couple of years ago, I re-examined Banemaster, and while all of the initial criticisms about the childish inappropriateness of the art remain, especially framed in the context of “is this comparable to other trading card game art?” I do think there’s a quirky kind of charm to them. They feel more like Old School Revival style illustrations now, as if someone was intentionally trying to make it look like outsider art. I have a couple of ideas for repurposing some of the card art; it’s something…I don’t know quite what yet. The game itself is still terrible, barely playable and just not any fun. But, looking at what happened afterward, I no longer harbor any ill will or resentment about my time in Berkeley.