After Action Reporter

Dwarf Fortress is one of the most interesting games you’ve probably never heard of. And Boatmurdered, the funniest AAR you’ve never heard of. If you’ve not heard of Dwarf Fortress, the best way of describing it is to say it’s a mix of Dungeon Keeper and NetHack. On steroids. Visually, it’s horrific (made better with the May Green tile set), its  complexity is legendary (thank god for the  Dwarf Fortress Wiki) with a learning curve that is more cliff-like than slope-like. I hear you laughing, but you won’t be giggling after you’ve sat through twentythree, ten-minute tutorial videos!

But despite the barriers to entry (barriers? Nay, pit traps, serated disks, and drowning rooms!), Dwarf Fortress is an extremely immersive game once you get into it. There’s nothing like watching your dwarfs react, with personality, to events around them, and who doesn’t get excited at the idea of creating complex traps involving magma, spikes, and hordes of bobby-trapped kittens?

Did I mention magma? Because that’s where Boatmurdered comes in; a legendary Dwarf Fortress run by a succession of Something Awful goons. So legendary is Boatmurdered that it got its own corner of the web dedicated to it and its own fan art (courtesy of the Something Awful posters).

Even if you hate Dwarf Fortress you should give Boatmurdered a read (or at least, skip forward to magma). I guarantee you’ll end up giggling, and you might even give Dwarf Fortress a go. Why not, it’s free after all, and then you too can regail your friends with stories of your dwarfs, catsposians and innevitable emo-death cycles.