What colour is magic?

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

That's reminiscent of the movie A Matter of Life and Death (although the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) and also SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. You can try it for yourself here.

Sorcerer created quite a stir among boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, might have been a reaction to the growing success of Dungeons & Dragons.

In the rulebook there was an intriguing magic item mentioned only once in passing: "Opa lost his Color Sword in a gambling house." We mused a lot about what a sword like that would do, though on reflection it may be that all the sorcerers were just assumed to have one to cast their magic with.

A decade after Sorcerer, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series of gamebooks. Each title in the series came as two volumes, allowing two players to compete against each other. The first title, Challenge of the Magi, involved duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for spiritual stuff

Each player took one of the books and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land (above) trying to fake out your opponent so they didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest.  The books had detailed rules, which were easy to use even so, and they were weighty: 800 sections each. There was also a solo-play option.

Duel Master should have been a massive success, but the gamebook craze didn't last long enough to support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. If they had been released as cheap two-player boardgames or card games, would they still be played today?