Lost Worlds -- OK, I broke down and bought it

I've toyed with picking up a couple of Lost Worlds books for years, literally.

I was a big fan of Aces of Aces and eventually got the whole set of those, including all the World War I books, the Wingleader World War II set and the Jet Eagles modern set.

I once had the Bounty Hunter book, but somewhere along the line that got misplaced.

Anyway, I've long thought about picking up a couple of Lost Worlds books but never did, until this weekend at the World Boardgame Championships when I stopped by the Flying Buffalo Inc. book. FBI and I go back a long way as well, I was an early player of Rick Loomis' computer moderated Play By Mail games of Nuclear Destruction and Battle Plan and have picked up all the Nuclear War series of games, too,

(Later, while waiting for the Nuclear War tournament to start, Loomis told us at the table about how he had tracked down Nuclear War design Doug Malewicki in 1975 using a Los Angeles phone book in order to buy the rights. To this day Malewicki gets royalty checks from Loomis.)

So when I spotted the Azlana Darque book I was very tempted. There's nothing like a hot babe with a broadsword to catch the eye!

Apparently Ms. Darque is a model with her own Web Site and, judging from a quick look at the site, somewhat of a free-spirited sort, unsurprisingly. Here's her site: http://azlanadarque.com/

Still, you have to have two books in order to play the game and most of the stuff I'd already seen before and had passed up buying many times in the past.

But there was another new (2007) book in the pile and that sealed the deal.

There was Zocchi the Magician!

Now Lou Zocchi was one of the very first "names" I learned in the hobby, back around 1969 or 1970. One of my first non-Avalon Hill "war games" was a Star Trek-based miniatures-style starship combat game he published. It was a good game for the time and the miniatures were very good as well.

Zocchi was also famous for his multi-sided dice, and patented a design for a 100-sided die, too. So it's no surprise that his weapon of choice is a dice bag filled with magic dice.

Well, "The Ancient One" was even harder to pass by than the Babe With Broadsword (actually a two-handed sword, but I prefer alliteration over accuracy in this case), so I finally bought a coy of Lost Worlds more than two decades after I first became aware of it.