En Garde!
En Garde! is a role-playing game set in 17th century Paris. Players take the roles of gentlemen duellists. The game was designed by Frank Chadwick and first published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1975.
History
Game Designers' Workshop got into the RPG field with En Garde! (1975), a swashbuckling game by Frank Chadwick; it was a hybrid game, part RPG and part strategy.En Garde! was designed by Darryl Hanny and Frank Chadwick, and published as a 48-page digest-sized book in 1975, with a revised edition in 1977.David M. Ewalt, in his book Of Dice and Men, commented that En Garde! was one of the first early competing products in the role-playing game field to TSR's Dungeons & Dragons, describing it as "a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasized man-to-man sword fighting. Players responded to the Three Musketeers-style setting, but they didn't care for the rules."
In the 1980s the game had become widely played by mail but GDW did not reprint it when stocks were exhausted. Theo Clarke and Paul Evans ran a game for over 20 players at the UK Gamesfair in 1983. Evans then wrote a BASIC computer program to administer the game and they ran increasingly large games at successive games fairs. Evans started a postal game using the same computer programs in 1986 in a new magazine called Small Furry Creatures Press, which he co-published with Clarke. Evans continues to run this game as Les Petites Bêtes Soyeuses.
