PRESTAGS and Middle-earth???

[Deleted]

I found an interesting quote from chirine ba kal on therpgsite in a thread on Tekumel and the Empire of the Petal Throne. My understanding is that he was one of the long-time original players in Barker’s EPT campaign, which seems to give his statements a lot of credibility.

PRESTAGS was SPI's attempt to do a Middle Earth board game without a license; if you put all the counters in piles sorted by color, oddly enough you got all the armies of Middle Earth. If you put all the maps together the right way, you got a very good map of Middle Earth. The five games in the series / set were finally marketed as historical board games, and they were actually very good; i played them for decades, and had a lot of fun with them.

This is interesting. I’ve never played PRESTAGS but have long heard of it, but this was the first time I had seem any sort of PRESTAGS to Middle Earth connection. I thought I'd ask around here to see what some of the really old timers had to say about the topic.

Here’s the link. The quote is about halfway through post #4 in the thread,
www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=32577

[Finarvyn]

Interesting. I don't recall offhand if I ever put all five of the mapboards together or not, so I guess I can't confirm if they look like Middle-earth or not. SPI did a Middle-earth wargame around that same time, so it would be strange to have PRESTAGS fill the same role.

On the other hand, chirine has always proven to be an excellent source of information.

[coffee]

Very cool.

First time I ever heard of PRESTAGS I wanted to get it, but that was approximately when SPI was going out of business, so I've never really had a chance. (But I'm okay with that; I have enough games in the house already -- just ask my wife!)

[Otto Harkaman]

Well it sounds like a nice conspiracy idea but since pictures of all the maps are available on Boardgamegeek you can see it doesn't look like that. Perhaps they were thinking of SPI's War of the Ring which is a game about Middle Earth?

PRESTAGS

Five Complete Simulation Games. At last Simulations Publications has an integrated Pre-Seventeenth Century Tactical Game Systems (PRESTAGS) for simulation of all military systems prior to the predominance of fire weapons.The game system used in this series is based on the highly-regarded Musket & Pike system (although many modifications and special rules were devised to demonstrate the differences between historical periods.) All the games are compatible -- and they can be used to trace the evolution of tactics over the course of history from 3000 B.C. to 1550 A.D. Each game in the series covers a segment of the period, and presents the tactical situations faced by leaders of the great battles of the period.

Map from Chariot


Map from Spartan


Map from Legion


Map from Viking


Map from Yeoman


SPI's War of the Ring

[Falconer]

Yeah, I’m guessing he was thinking of War of the Ring.

[jmccann]

Did PRESTAGS form the basis for Gondor and Sauron? I don't think I have ever seen the PRESTAGS rules.

[owlorbs]

Sorry I'm late to the party. PRESTAGS did not form the basis for Gondor, having played and enjoyed both Viking and Gondor I can attest to that. I'm not sure why the PRESTAGS to Middle Earth connection was mentioned. I know that there were fan made scenarios for Middle Earth using the SPI Tactical game Dark Ages which later became PRESTAGS Viking see: Jagdpanther Magazine #7 - Rohirrim! scenario by Scott Rusch. PRESTAGS does have a nice variety of units such that you could easily make a Middle Earth scenario given the desire. The other similarity is that SPI graphic design wizard Redmond A. Simonsen did the counter art for these games, which use some of the same iconography.