As far as I know, not too many copies of this game were ever sold, but that is not very surprising. Avalon Hill was more of a hard-core specialty war game publisher. They did little, if any, mainstream advertising. Their customer base typically had little interest in a game of this sort. I believe we got one royalty check for about $400 and another for $50ish. Oh, well, it is a fun game though!
For my sources, I appropriated imagery from the archives of each broad racial group depicted. I suppose some today would object to this on several levels, but it boots not. Oh-so-cleverly the numbers of sides on each symbol increase…the circle having one (or two if you count both inside and outside), the crescent having two (or four…), &c, &c. Naturally, being playing cards, the images need to be mirrored and it was fun working that out. A little more difficult, and certainly less successful, was the lettering (not depicted in these images) for each “court card”. The object was calligraphy which read the same whether upside or downside for the words: LORD, QUEEN, PRIESTESS, WARRIOR, ASSASSIN, THIEF.
OD was published in 1985. Avalon Hill trademarked it as their “metaphysical card game” and “elemental force card game”…”A unique blend of skill and chance.” What is an od? “An od is an element of theoretical force. By bringing the ods into balance, one may reach perfection in the metaphysical world. All of life is seeking after such balance. So too is this game.” I’m not exactly sure what that means. Yes, a well-balanced life sounds like a good thing, until one starts nit-picking about what exactly is being balanced. At any rate, OD is a good game, though it would have been better if published with the original components. In what were probably cost cutting moves, two standard 6-sided dice were substituted for the original 6, 8, 10 and 12 sided dice and the number of thief cards was cut down from the initial 20 to a measly 6. The cards themselves are heavy stock but definitely not standard durable playing card stock and they are much worse for wear over the years.
Way back when, my buddy Dave devised a card game…it was based on the number of cards in a Tarot deck and involved the use of polyhedral dice. He asked me to make illustrations for the face cards. Somehow, he managed to persuade the Avalon Hill Game Company of Baltimore, Maryland to publish the game, which is called OD. We were quite thrilled, since some of our favorite war games were published by Avalon Hill.
It cannot be denied that winter is a-getting us down. But, it is a small price to pay to keep the insects at bay!
This example is an improvement in that it is grammatical English: “Time did age Madame. Gad, I demit!” It is unlikely that these sentences were ever spoken…a statement that a married woman had gotten older, followed by a declaration to resign from office…but you read it here first!
This example is more of a sentence than #1…it is, however, slightly ungrammatical and makes little sense: “Tiler is eye-level, eyes I relit.”
A 5×5 grid offers more challenge…ideally there would be 3 palindromic 5-letter words, of which 2 were repeated…an ABCBA pattern. And it would make some sort of sense! I haven’t worked that out yet. This one reads like the musing of a fretting mathemaniac: Never even, ever even, ever even.
Confession: While most people spent their time on useful activities, I squandered mine devising Magic Squares. Here are some easy 3×3 squares…all are palindromes of course, reading the same from top to bottom and right to left and backwards. Furthermore, they make some sort sense in English, although they are somewhat tortured: Raw as a war….Now Ono Won…Mad At Adam (or Mad at a dam).
I don’t recall when or if the situation ever arose, nonetheless, I felt if I ever claimed “artistic license” and was challenged on that point, some actual back-up might be of use. Drawing upon the under-utilized virtue of self-reliance, I made my own…and a “poetic license” as well. While I was at it, I fashioned a gang o’ them for family and friends. This whimsome, laminated photo-ID card was actually once accepted at a hospital. It has not yet gotten me through an airport check-in, but my buddy Dave claims to have had success in doing so.