MOBY CLUB JULY
Master of Magic
Developed by SimTex
4x strategy civ game but with cool wizards instead of inventing pottery

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After we bought our 486 Packard Bell family PC, my dad was gifted random games from his coworkers, and Master of Magic was one of those titles I remember him bringing home like it was yesterday. Leading up to this game I had mostly played real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft II.  It was a different change of pace to play something like Master of Magic which is a slower-paced affair than those other games.

This game came out in the era of PC game releases being sold in giant boxes. Typically, these big box games would include textbook-grade instruction manuals which always made it exciting to get a new game. I spent a few days reading the instruction manual and diving into the lore before getting into the game. It took a while for me to be able to play the game as my dad would play it constantly so I would have to sneak in time on the weekend or while he was at work.

It's weird to think that I have been playing a game for almost two decades.



Typical Masters of Magic Starting Screen, courtesy MobyGames


If you've played games such as Civilization or other 4x games then you should have a general idea of what to expect. The difference between Civilization and this game is that instead of inventing pottery you learn how to summon ghosts, demons, and other magical creatures. You can also recruit heroes which you can equip with different items that give stat boosts. You can build settlements and cities across the map near key resource points, and capture magical nodes based on various elemental types to improve your magic abilities. There's a dark and light world map to explore which gives you a lot more land to conquer than in Civilization. You can build units inside of your towns and additionally summon more powerful units using MP.

The end goal is to either defeat all other wizards or cast the Spell of Mastery.



Magical Land Surveying


There were a few other versions of the game released. Besides the DOS version, the only other I've seen in action is the Japanese-only PSX version.  This edition added some graphical and music enhancements over the DOS version.

After looking into the game a bit more while researching for this article, I also learned of a Civilization 2 scenario called Masters of Magic Jr. that I haven't tried but looks pretty fun. They were planning a Windows 98 updated edition but SimTex (developer) shut down before the project could be completed.

In recent years, it was released on Steam with the Caster of Magic upgrade pack. There is also a remake that you can read about over here if you're interested.



Exploring the Dark World


Things that I thought were really cool about this game:

The degree of customization for your Wizards / Wizard nation.
It allows you to choose a wizard from a selection of a a few different faces. From there, you can go with the default spell variety assigned to each wizard or give them a completely customized load out of spells.
You can also choose from a wide variety of different fantasy races to command which determine the base units that you can work with as well as the appearance / structures that you can build in your city.

   

Really good AdLib / SoundBlaster tunes

The things that kinda sucked:

The game balance in some areas is a bit lacking.

Combat gets kinda sluggish / clunky when getting a ton of units on the screen and makes me wish that it had a more Civ style combat system honestly.

I do recommend checking it out if you like strategy games like Civ or want to feel like a cool and powerful wizard.

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Be sure to check out the MobyClub over on the AstroJone each month to check out another cool game from yesteryear: