This is Dragonmaster (1981), a card game by Milton Bradley and yet another example of a product looking to capitalize on the boom of fantasy in pop culture consciousness.
It is a card game that…kind of reminds me of Euchre, maybe? I don’t know card games very well, so I am probably wrong. Anyway, the rules kind of baffle me and are also rather dull, so I am not going to get into them. Just know, it is essentially a fantasy themed version of some sort of regular card game, with plastic gems standing in for chips. There is very little here on a mechanical level to justify that cover copy. “The ultimate power struggle in a forgotten land?” Nah.
But oh, that fantasy theming. Would you look at that art? Straight gorgeous. Pick this up, you’ve got one hell of a set of NPC portraits. I just can’t get over how pretty they all are. I love the pallets, I love the flatness and how the design elements are weaved into the compositions and that weird ass double stroke around everything. Extremely of the time, I think, especially the beautifully hideous color scheme on the box top, but also so good, good, good.
Chromo Valdez is the art project of a touring musician who delivers appliances for money and creates glitch art for fun. He has created a series of fascinating glitch landscapes that are a perfect representation of the glitch aesthetic; deconstruct the image of the world you THINK you are seeing on the computer screen into what it really is: digitized circuity fooling your eyes. Here nature and the computer are presented to your eyes simultaneously, and the results are both beautiful and thought provoking.
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