Monday, May 21, 2012

#151 SCHMIDT - DAS SCHWARZE AUGE QUARTETT (1989)



The Black Eye (often also Dark World), or Das Schwarze Auge (DSA) is a role-playing game created in 1984 by Ulrich Kiesow. These games were very popular during the 80s, after the world-wide success of Dungeons and Dragons (1974) or Tunnels and Trolls. Ulrich Kiesow worked in his free time as translator of fantasy texts, including texts of role-playing game’s books. His first game was Das Schwarze Auge, and the one that brought fame to him. DSA was expanded by numerous books, rules and characters. Maybe it was a success because of the fantasy world in which it is set, in the Tolkien style (with dragons, elves, dwarfs and all those types of fictional characters). I’m sorry I cannot give much information about the game, but I never played it in any of its variants.

Due to this popularity, the game had its own merchandising, and side-products, for example, this deck of cards I present here today.




It is nothing but a classic “quartett” card game, 32 cards in 8 groups of 4 cards each; this game can be adapted to any possible topic you can imagine. In this case, the images in the cards are simply illustrations of the playing books. The only curiosity is that some of these images were at the time unreleased.
Schmidt Spiele (not to be mistaken with FX Schmid) is a German game publisher. It was founded in 1912. The founder, Josef Friedrich Schmidt, had invented a few years earlier a game named “Mensch ärgere dich nicht”, that has been a great success ever since (English: Parcheesi or Ludo, Spanish: Parchis,…). The company is actually two independent companies that merged in 1970: one founded by Josef Friedrich Schmidt, and another one founded by his son Franz Schmidt. 

Although the company went bankrupt in 1997, it was sold to the Blatz-Group and they kept the name, so it is still possible to find card and board games with this name in toy-shops worldwide.

FACTS AND FIGURES 
  • Name: DAS SCHWARZE AUGE QUARTETT (No. 03170)
  • Year: 1989 
  • Company: Schmidt Spiele (Germany)

No comments:

Post a Comment