En Garde!
En Garde! is a role-playing game set in 17th century Paris where players take the roles of gentlemen duellists. The game was designed by Darryl Hany, Frank Chadwick and Paul Evans and first published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1975. History. Game Designers' Workshop got its start the role-playing game field with "En Garde!" (1975), published as a 48-page digest-sized book in 1975, with a revised edition in 1977. David M. Ewalt, in his book "Of Dice and Men", commented that "En Garde!" was one of the first early competing products in the  role-playing game field to TSR's "Dungeons & Dragons", describing it as "a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasized man-to-man sword fighting. Players responded to the "Three Musketeers"-style setting, but they didn't care for the rules." Frank Chadwick designed this swashbuckling game as a hybrid of role-playing game and strategy game. In the 1980s the game had become widely played by mail but GDW did not reprint it when stocks were exhausted. Theo Clarke and Evans ran a game for over 20 players at the UK Gamesfair in 1983. Evans then wrote  a BASIC computer program to administer the game and they ran increasingly large games at successive games fairs. Evans started a postal game using the same computer programs in 1986 in a new magazine called "Small Furry Creatures Press", which he co-published with Clarke. Evans continues to run this game as "Les Petites Bêtes Soyeuses". The success of the game also led to an annual convention which ran for over ten years. Clarke and Evans found a demand for the rule book arising from their games and other postal games. Under the name SFC Press they intended to publish  a new edition of the game under license from Chadwick. When SFC Press was liquidated in 2003 the rights to the game were acquired by Evans personally. Evans' company Margam Evans produced a new edition, the 4th, of the game. Although the 1987 Swedish product "En Garde!" by Ragnarök Speldesign is also a role-playing game set in seventeenth-century France that emphasizes fencing, it has no connection to this game. Reception. In the inaugural issue of "Games International", Richard Ashley reviewed the republished edition by Small Furry Creatures Press, and was impressed by its improved layout, as well as  the new chapter on postal play. He concluded by giving this game an above-average rating of 4 out of 5, saying, "This new edition retains all the old rules with a superior presentation."