One of my favorite old games is Titan, from Avalon Hill. I have played it since all the way back in high school. I’ve also mentioned it on this blog already. It’s one of my top 10 games on BoardGameGeek; in fact, it’s #10 on the list on my BGG profile, which means that it’s the oldest, not that it’s the least favorite.

It’s both a wargame and a fantasy themed board game, so there’s just no denying its appeal. It combines the delight of building armies of fantastic monsters with the thrill of rolling large amounts of dice in combat.

I played a lot when I was young; it was surely one of the more popular games among my circles as a teenager. I even wrote a BoardGameGeek session report about a game I played back in the early 1980s: Bad Luck in a Long Ago Game of Titan.

As I got older, I found fewer people willing to play. I did have a few friends who played in the late 1990s into the 2000s. That was when I developed a variant I called “Tactical Titan,” where you build a huge map and focus on the combat, ignoring the higher level strategy map. I actually hand made my own maps, coloring in hex paper, but photocopying the existing game components and assembling a map is another way it could work.

I devised scenarios, with special maps that had limited types of terrain and thus limited the monsters used. I came up with magic items that could be seeded on the map and would enhance the monsters in combat. There were some new rules to accomodate the large tactical map, and new monster types. This is similar to variants other Titan fans have come up with.

I managed to rope a few players into this version of the game, and played a lot of two-player games with one particular friend who sadly passed away in the early 2000s.

Later, I developed another variant that got a slight amount of play. It was called “Campaign Titan” and the idea was that your Titan (the leader of your armies) would earn XP from game to game and level up as a character, picking up all kinds of abilities, even spells. Again, I only got a few players into it (I think two total) and this version did not get played much, so the rules I have written around it are largely untested.

The last time I played Titan was probably in 2015. It’s just hard to find people interested in this kind of game, and willing to commit to the long hours it takes to play all the way through.

I have a bunch of pages on my gamer site devoted to the Titan variants I created here: Steve’s Titan Corner. You can also find links there to the content that other Titan fans have created. We old grognards are still out there, showing our devotion to this classic game!