Last week my Main Squeeze and I taught the game of Fortress to a group of 20 middle-schoolers, so I thought it was about time I posted the rules on-line.
Never really a deep geek, I still played a fair amount of Dungeons & Dragons as a teen. I was usually the one that aggravated the DM to no end by stubbornly insisting that my character could discover a deck of trumps from Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber even if it didn’t exist in the Dungeon Master’s guide.
Later, in an effort to encourage my son’s first efforts at reading, we brought out the old D&D manuals and at the suggestion of some older kids in our circle, introduced Magic: The Gathering. I will heartily vouch for these activities as enticements to reading and vocabulary expansion but fair warning: if you venture too deep, they can severely impact your disposable income.
As my son grew older, we began inventing games of our own. After creating an incredibly complex card game called Royal Orgy (only he can remember all the rules) and a dominoes-inspired maze-building expansion to Cheapass Games’ Button Men, we created Fortress.
In Fortress, players deploy and equip characters on a battlefield and strive to destroy the opponent’s fortress. The game utilizes the dynamics of popular trading card games, but requires only one or more standard decks of playing cards.
If you’d like to try it out – I’ve posted all of the rules (with a crude example video) here: Rules of Fortress
Enjoy!