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When you got your hands on a floppy disk package with this curiosity in the nineties, you knew you were in for something strange. Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan is a computer adaptation of the legendary fantasy tabletop game that American hobbyist circles had been enjoying since the seventies. On screen, though, it looks like someone took a drawn canvas and tried to hastily redraw it into ASCII art.
It's classic dungeon crawling with a minimalist approach. You create a character, descend into the underground with a band of fellow adventurers filled with demons and goblins, and collect treasure. You play in first person, the map is drawn in these checkerboard squares, and tunnels, chasms, and heaps of monsters are everywhere. The goal is simple: survive, loot, roll dice when something attacks.
The game works as a direct translation of a tabletop RPG to computer. So instead of a Dungeon Master, something is calculating for you—you encounter a monster and the procedure is clear: roll, compare, resolve. Dialogue is minimal, navigation precise. There's no graphical magic in it, but the game's logic is solid and in the nineties it had you in its grip. The problem is that without the paper tools it feels hollow, and time transforms this essence of tabletop play into something that simply doesn't exist on a monitor—namely, company and spontaneity.
Still, Khazan had lessons to teach. It took source material beloved by its cult following and melted it into a functional, playable program. It wasn't entertainment in the simple sense of the word, but for a certain kind of nerdy devotion. Today it looks like a digital artifact—a case where they tried to capture tabletop RPG in binary and almost pulled it off.
Play it today? Not in a browser, but in DOSBox without trouble. It's better for those who know Tunnels & Trolls from paper and are curious what it looked like on computer, than for those looking for fun in today's sense. It's more of a museum piece than a game that'll grab you and refuse to let go.
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