Dark Tower

Welcome back to the Trove of Ancient Secrets! 

I was reminded of the greatest board game ever.  It was a rare masterpiece even in my youth and has only grown more scarce as time lumbers ever on.  It is an epic game of Good vs Evil, spanning over four great kingdoms all riddled with tombs and ruins, bedeviled by Brigands, beset by an Evil Wizard, and stalked by a ferocious Dragon!

I am, of course, talking about the Milton Bradley fantasy board game called Dark Tower!

In the center of the board stood the Tower itself, really a computer that kept track of all the monsters, as well as your troops and supplies.  Each player starts in a different Kingdom.  No matter which kingdom you start in, you have to retrieve a Key from each of the other Kingdoms.  You must use all three keys--in the proper order--to enter the tower and confront the bad guy.

But that's not all!  You can hire warriors to help you in your fights with Brigands.  You can hire a Healer so you don't lose as many during a fight or from sicknesses you can get during your travels.  You can hire a Scout so you don't get lost during your travels.  But then you have to buy enough food to feed everyone, and sometimes hire a Beast of burden to carry your supplies.  If you're lucky enough to find the Magic Sword, you can kill the Dragon if you happen to cross paths with it!  All of these are represented by different Icons that appear on the Tower.

Once you rally your forces and collect the three Keys, you advance to the Tower and try to unlock the main gate.  If you use the Key in the wrong order...I think you lost at least one of them and had to go find it again.  It's been a long time, I don't recall exactly.

But it was the coolest board game ever!  Stop Theif only had sounds, making it the third-best game ever.*  This had sounds and pictures (and was Fantasy!).  I really can't think of anything else that was quite like it.

I understand that Restoration Games had a Kickstarter to raise funds to make a reboot called Return to Dark Tower.  I believe the Kickstarter was successful, and they were hoping to release the game in July of last year, but I haven't found it anywhere.  The release was probably screwed up by the lockdowns, everything else was.

As for the original Dark Tower, I've only ever seen it on eBay, and if it has all the pieces and actually works--it costs a small fortune!  But I still have very fond memories of that game!

How about you?  Have you ever played Dark Tower?  Were you fortunate enough to have owned it once?  If so, what happened to it?  Tell us about it below in the comments!  

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell

*  The Second-Best board game ever is obviously Fireball Island, but you knew that cuz you read my post about it.

Unknown Island

There you are!  I've been waiting for you because it's Time for Another Safari! 

So get this:  I was over on YouTube, minding my own business; when I spied this suggested video.  It was an old adventure movie from 1948 called "Unknown Island".  I had never heard of it before.

It stars a bunch of people I don't know who are, but then I found a point of reference for a couple of them.  Virginia Grey was in "Another Thin Man" (great series of mysteries starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles) and also in "The Big Store" (a Marx Brothers vehicle).

Richard Denning will go on to be in the classic Universal Monster movie "The Creature From the Black Lagoon".  And later in the less prestigious films "Creature With the Atom Brain" and "The Black Scorpion"; a pair of really bad B-movies that are in my vast collection.

So here's the story:

In Singapore, a formal WWII pilot named Osborne and his fiancée Carole (played by Virginia Grey) want to charter a shady ship's captain to take them to an island well off the shipping routes.  During the war, Osborne was knocked off course by a storm and found the island to be inhabited by dinosaurs!  He wants to go back and get a bunch of pics so he can make a ton of money.

 The ship's captain informs them of another man who knows about the island:  a local drunkard named Fairbanks (played by Richard Denning).  Fairbanks was once on a boat that also got lost in a storm and shipwrecked on the island.  He and his fellow castaways built a raft to escape, but Fairbanks was the only one who made it...the rest of the castaways were eaten by dinosaurs.

Since the two stories seem to corroborate the other, the shady captain agrees to the voyage.  The trip is long and arduous, and his crew of natives tries to mutiny...but fails.  Then they get to the island...and things start to get dangerous!

Yes!  There are cheesy dinosaurs!  Some are stop-motion brontosaurus-types, others are rubber-suit T-Rex wannabes.   And some...I guess are just some kind of puppets.  

But that's not all!  The crew are still mutinous, Fairbanks is falling for Carole, Carole is getting disillusioned with Osborne who wants more pics, and the shady Captain vows he won't leave the island until he captures a dino alive!  

In addition to all of this, there is another creature on this island.  They call it a Giant Sloth, but it looks more like a guy in a gorilla suit.  In fact, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, it's supposed to be none other than Crash Corrigan in that gorilla suit!  He played a LOT of cowboys and a LOT of gorillas and he went to the Undersea Kingdom!

This was a fun bit of cheese!  It mostly went the way I expected it to...thought one guy lived that I thought was gonna die and another guy died that I thought was gonna live...  I tried to go in with low expectations, but it was surprisingly good!  

Is it the best movie ever?  No!  But it was an enjoyable way to kill an hour-and-a-half.  There's a pretty good chance I would sit through it again, and I recommend you try it out, too, if you like those cheesy old movies with rubber-suit monsters!  Like I said, a simple search on YouTube will lead you right to it!

Or maybe you've already seen it?  If so, what did you think about it?  Tell us down in the comments below!

Until then, I wish you all...

Good Adventuring!
Timothy A. Sayell