King Graham's Board Game Challenge

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US box art.

Crazy Nick's Software Picks: King Graham's Board Game Challenge is a puzzle video game developed and published by Sierra On-Line in 1992 for MS-DOS. It was part of the Crazy Nick's Software Picks series of budget computer games, as well as the King's Quest series. This particular title includes a rendition of backgammon and checkers. Each features a few game play variants.

Personal

When my cousin got the King's Quest: Collector's Edition in 1994, this game was bundled in with it. I remember playing it at the time and always losing to the AI because, at the time, I had never played backgammon before, and rarely played checkers. On 2020-05-29, I tried playing the game and beat the expert difficulty AI at both checkers and backgammon on my first try.

Status

I don't own this game, but I have beaten it.

Review

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4 5 5 4 4

Best Version: DOS

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

  • The game competently enforces the rules for the games, and also includes variants which you can adjust in the settings.
  • I like how King Graham emotes how he's feeling during particularly good or bad moves.

Bad

  • The AI isn't particularly bright. I'm not a very good backgammon or checkers player, but I was able to beat the expert difficulty AI in both games without much trouble.
  • Although the games have a couple tunes and sound effects, it would have been nicer if there were proper background music.
  • I would have appreciated a little customization to the game play. Perhaps different types of checkers and dice as well as alternate backgrounds.

Ugly

  • Although it would have been trivial to implement, the game doesn't support two-player mode.

Media

Box Art

The box art is about what you would expect from a budget release: garish. It has some primitive boards of checkers and backgammon, an ugly painting of Graham, and bright eye-catching text.

Documentation

Videos

Longplay - Average difficulty.

Links

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