RAM!

RAM! was published in 1985 by The Avalon Hill Game Company, the legend of tabletop wargaming, whose computer division spent the eighties translating board game thinking onto home computers. This time the choice fell on a subject video games avoided then and still avoid now: the battles of ancient war galleys.

You take command of triremes in the era of the Peloponnesian War, the clash between Athens and Sparta. Triremes carried no cannon and no catapults; the main weapon was the bronze ram on the bow, and battles were won by manoeuvre — build up speed, strike the enemy's flank, breach the hull or shear off his oars. That is precisely the kind of combat RAM! attempts to simulate from a top-down view: not a game of reflexes but of angles, speed and reading your opponent's intent.

It sounds great on paper; the execution is another song. The game is austere to the bone, explains its rules grudgingly, and neither period nor retrospective judgements have been kind — reviewers repeatedly call it primitive and confusing, and it is hard to argue with them. The graphics are schematic even for the mid-eighties, and without patience, ideally with the manual at hand, you will simply get lost in what is happening on screen.

So who is it for? Historians of the genre and lovers of antiquity, who will appreciate that someone tried to simulate rams and oars at all — in that respect RAM! has had almost no competition to this day. If you expect a game that guides and rewards you, look elsewhere; if you want an artifact from the days when wargames were written for the patient, here it is in its purest, unfiltered form.

You can examine it on oldgame.cz directly in your browser, with no installation.