BaD #13: Quiz & Dragons

On 02/19/2018 at 12:27 PM by daftman

I've got to give it to Quiz & Dragons, a 1992 arcade game. I've never played an RPG quiz board game! Well, okay, the RPG aspects are really light. It has a generic fantasy setting and each of the characters (barbarian, wizard, amazon warrior, and ninja) have a special ability that will randomly come into play. There is no leveling or stats or anything like that. The board game is pretty superficial as well. A big digital die determines how many spaces you move and while there are a few branching paths, it's mostly just a series of trivia fights. That's the game, basically. Each enemy requires a certain number of correct answers to defeat and your character loses a life with each wrong answer. While the stages do change aesthetically, the fights are all the same, even for the bosses. The questions really date the game too. While I did very well on the history and science questions (and merely okay on the plethora of United States trivia lol), the '70s and '80s minutiae killed me. Who starred in this TV show, who won that Oscar, what team drafted so and so. My gosh, SO MANY baseball questions!

Ultimately, Quiz & Dragons is a trapped in the time it was made. While playing it is still fun, despite the dated questions, it wears thin pretty quickly if you try to play the whole thing at once (I wish it had video game questions instead). These days you're better off just sticking with Trivia Crack.

Super Step Contributing Writer

02/19/2018 at 02:27 PM

The Japanese sure do love their baseball. Or was this an American game? Because both countries sure do love their baseball.

daftman

02/20/2018 at 12:09 AM

I'm sure it was Japanese originally and localization team instead became the "just make all new questions" team

KnightDriver

02/19/2018 at 02:56 PM

I love this game. Love the art too. I love all these kind of mashups with rpgs. Games like Culdcept that combine an rpg with board and card games and Puzzle Quest that mashes up an rpg with a match-3 style battle system. Why aren't there more of them?

I wish you could update this with new questions too.

02/20/2018 at 12:11 AM

And Modern Warfare proved you could combine RPG progression with an online multiplayer shooter. It'll work for anything!

02/20/2018 at 05:34 PM

Yeah, rpg elements are even in sports games now. That's fine, but I want a more explicit mash up. Like footballers as orcs or something.

02/20/2018 at 09:17 PM

RPG Bloodbowl!

02/20/2018 at 09:22 PM

Right on!

Cary Woodham

02/20/2018 at 04:49 AM

While the questions were dated, when I played this on the Capcom collections, I still found it surprisingly fun. Or at least more fun than I thought it would be. I also like the Capcom character designs in it.

02/20/2018 at 09:21 PM

It certainly looks great! Just playing through the whole thing at once is a little too much, I think.

SanAndreas

02/20/2018 at 11:31 PM

I had a game like this on my Atari 130XE computer when I was a kid. It was called Trivia Quest, and was a board game where you and up to three other players answered questions and moved around a game board with a medieval theme. Some of the squares were dragons that you had to fight with bows and arrows. You had to complete three circuits around the board to your castle as a page, knight, and prince. These classes of characters also differed in their ability to fight dragons. The Page was weak, while the Knight was actually better than the Prince, even though the Prince was supposed to be higher-ranked. It was made in 1985, so its questions were even more dated. There were questions in it about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

02/22/2018 at 12:18 AM

That's pretty cool! But I guess you gotta play these games when they're fresh lol

PixlBit