"Mirrorweld" is a fantasy conquest board game invented by Charmaine Riley, of Romford, Essex. Originally entitled
Mirrorworld, the game got its unique monikor during the pitch to the famous games manufacturer Wazzocks!. Charmaine was accompanied to the pitching meeting to Wazzocks! by her dim mother, Arthur. When the Head of Emerging Board Game Technology and R&D, Dr Ed "Eddie" Edward Edwardson, asked the name of the game, the perennially daffy Arthur Riley blurted out "mirrorweld", her thick Essex accent mangling the word "world." Edwardson thought it a brilliant name, and so it stuck.
Mirrorweld is a game for seventeen players, the object of the game to capture the mystical Romford Village in the eponymous province of Mirrorweld. Players must play as the seventeen classical fantasy characters: idiot savant, alcoholic wizard, lame duck, rice trader, yoghurt-eater, conjoined elf twins, halfling prostitute, lounge pianist, software engineer, Irish immigrant, tea drinker, malevolent sister, effete king, morbidly obese dwarf, Sarah Palin, quadriplegic stonemason, and dying bird.
Each character will be armed with a weapon, allocated randomly. Characters may be allocated: curling tongs, cigarette lighter, cup of tea, running shoes, cricket bat, brass doorknob, butler, wireless speaker system, shoehorn, blackboard, leather gloves, piece of wood, spoon, energy stick, protein shake, picture of baby, and stool. There are four Super Weapons to be discovered throughout the game: The Sword of Questionable Usefulness; The Arrow of Possible Misintention; The Axe of Irrefutable Axiness; and The Warhammer That Was and Remains Too Heavy.
Characters move according to the roll of a D13, which is combined with their Move range, determined by the differential between the mean of the baseline scores and the respective roll of a D7. Movement may be constrained by terrain hampers, determined by multiplying the terrain score for any particular square on the board with the roll of a D2. Movement penalties may be incurred if certain characters' movement scores are targeted by others (say, the alcoholic wizard has his ankles bound by the effete king).
Combat is enabled by the roll of a D1 combined with the Attack score of each combatant, determined by the roll of a D6 which is only negated if the roll of a D3 coincides thricely with the baseline attack score distributed at the start of the game. An attack may be powered up if a character attains a Super Weapon, whose use may only be determined by the eventuality of a character rolling a 6 on a D5, and doubles the effectiveness of the attack. A defending character gets a chance to a) defend, b) counter or c) evade an attack by thinking of a number between 1 and 10, trying to roll that number using a D37, subtracting the answer from 99 and writing the resultant number on a piece of card, which is then kept secret. The attacking player then has to guess that number using five rolls of a D12. If the guess is successful, the attack is successful, but if the guess is unsuccessful, the defending player then rolls a D6 to determine whether s/he defends, counters or evades the attack. There may be terrain bonuses / penalties for such periods of play. See the section headed "Dear God no, please not more rules."
The game ends when one of the characters manages to get to Romford Village without any of the players having been beaten up by their opponents, or the when the game is thrown out of the window in utter disgust.
~
Eric's Little Urn
