Included as a free pull-out centrepiece with Issue 3 of Warlock magazine in November 1984, Market Mayhem has the distinction of being the very first FF boardgame, as well as the very first official additional material (beyond the two scenarios included in the book) to be produced to exploit the Fighting Fantasy - The Role-Playing Game system created by Steve Jackson. The board is a simple two-page black-and-white spread divided into a grid with a few perfunctory simple pictures in some squares to add a bit of interest. Fourteen illustrated character profile cards in a hideous olive green describe the different player characters, and a bunch of small square chits with just words/names on them act as player character tokens (these are in the same bile-like green as the character cards to differentiate them from the NPCs and items), NPC tokens, and various items that can be picked up as you go around the board (it is worth mentioning here that the item cards can be used as projectile weapons by testing Skill - a nice touch of realism as it means there are ways to hurt other players beyond just one-on-one combat in adjacent squares with its associated risk element). Two pages of instructions with a couple of nice illustrations finish the package off. The art throughout is by someone called Dave Eastbury (his only work for FF) who, as far as I can tell from a Google search, is a comics artist who worked on The Beano, etc. The art is really nice though and is a sort of fusion of Russ Nicholson and Bob Harvey's styles with a little bit of Iain McCaig thrown in, none of which is a bad thing. It's a shame we did not see more from Eastbury in gamebooks. The Rules are very straightforward and explain the setting to add a bit of colour, run through all the characters including NPCs, and basically cover everything you need to know to play. The beauty there being that you can get straight on with the game. The components are intended to be mounted on stiff card otherwise they would be far too light and flimsy to serve any practical purpose and one sneeze from a player would send everything flying into oblivion and ruin the game.
Th game itself is a mass battle melee affair played in format of turns of Movement-Action (something White Dwarf also specialised in pre-Warlock) and these are a great way of introducing beginners (and/or people you are trying to convince to get into the hobby) to role-playing games and how fun they can be (as well as how uncomplicated they can be if you choose to let them and steer away from book-keeping, table cross-referencing, and endless dice rolls in lieu of ever actually doing any adventuring). Each player character has a set goal or task to complete but, oddly, the introduction suggests the real point of the game is to have everyone kill everyone else to get a last man standing situation, which I do not think is the idea. Surely the aim is to complete your defined task and get out alive rather than do your task then start indiscriminately killing people, especially when only a couple of the tasks are of the assassination type. There needs to be an element of assassin aims in the game as that allows certain players to become each others' secret targets and greatly adds to the fun and tactics of the game, but to override all of the character motivations with a battle royale does not work for me. It also presents the issue that, if each player plays as intended in the Rules and only has one character, as soon as someone has killed you for what might seem to be no reason at all, you are out of the game and can become a spectator for a rather long time as the other players duke it out. This game also has no apparent time limit or jeopardy in the sense of the authorities wading in (yes, the market guards can get involved and increase in number, but all you have to do to keep them at bay is keep killing them) so can go on forever, something that was addressed successfully in Warlock's later similar mass battle game with FF rules, the Judge Dredd-themed Shuggy Hall Brawl, wherein the setting gets raided by the Judges and everyone gets arrested after x number of game turns so there is much more of a sense of urgency. But Market Mayhem does not have this and, unless you add house rules, there is no actual achievable resolution other than everyone just deciding to kill each other.
The subject of the various characters' aims is worth discussing as there is a lot of variety to them to keep things interesting and add lots of replay value as you try out different characters over subsequent plays: some are out to kill others, some are looking for items, some want money or food, some are more esoteric and open to interpretation (ie require you to role-play), etc. The simpler and more tangible aims are often the more difficult (especially the hunter-killer ones), whereas the subtler ones such as having a good time can be completed in more than one way, requiring creativity on the parts of the players. For example, the market contains several NPC sideshows (a dancing bear, a fire-eater, a husband-and-wife knife throwing act, etc) all of which are forms of entertainment and can be interpreted by players as being resolutions to their aims, if they employ a bit of imagination (which, let's face it, is kind of the idea with RPGs so this is a success in that sense). The character who seeks money to repair his temple also needs to be played with a bit of lateral thinking and watching his player try and convince other players and NPCs to part with their cash and make a donation in increasingly elaborate or convoluted ways is a definite highlight. The NPCs are, for the most part, support players, and are all controlled by the referee (yes, this is a RPG so it needs a referee), and include the aforementioned entertainers as well as numerous stallholders, market guards, and a few of the typical annoyances found in these sorts of places such as a firebrand who jumps on issues bandwagons and tries to help people, a woman in the pillory, and some female slaves that are on sale. No prizes for guessing then that some of these characters hold the solutions to some of the player characters' goals.
As the game has a referee, this is where it can be adapted and there is no doubt in my mind that Market Mayhem demands modification and house rules to really draw out its potential. Firstly, there is no way in the game to restore any lost Stamina which means you will slowly and inevitably head towards death if you start to get wounded. This is a bit frustrating, especially if you are an assassination (or spite) target and, as several of the market stalls and NPCs are specifically there just to sell food and drink, it seems to be a gaping hole that the two cannot be connected, so I like to include Stamina replenishment through eating food you have bought. By extension then, secondly, also allowing players to start with some Gold Pieces is useful to allow them to a) buy food, and b) experience certain things such as watching the bear dance (or just bribing each other, which will happen in role-playing sooner or later, especially if players form alliances, which often does happen in Market Mayhem). Also, if no characters actually have a defined amount of money, the player trying to get donations (for one) surely cannot complete their aim, which is a bit of an issue. Thirdly, and this is more nuanced, there needs to be a motivation for each character to bother with their aim at all rather than just being psychotic, so introducing the idea of winning points for completing an aim adds another layer to the outcome of the game, often alongside leaving the market alive as soon as the aim is completed (which also avoids the aim-negating mass battle ending being the only possible outcome of the game). Fourthly, the mileage you can get from the game will only last as long as every character has been played by every player so the introduction of additional elements with scenarios or further characters would eventually have to come into play to avoid the game being eventually redundant. And finally, to avoid it being one-note, I do find this plays best with just three or four players (officially it caters for 3 to 15 players with one always being the referee), each controlling two or three characters each as that adds variety to the scope of each players' aims and also avoids someone getting just one particularly weak or overpowered character (or one with a less interesting goal) and deals better with the problem of someone dying at an early stage and sitting the bulk of the game out whilst getting increasingly more bored.
The actual look of the game and its components is very much a product of a time when these games were acceptably simpler visually and it does not stand up visually anymore (and was probably also rather basic and austere even then, although it was free so we can't complain). Time has moved on and boardgame players demand much more in terms of production values nowadays. The Rules do suggest the game is more effective if played with minis (and it is) notwithstanding trying to remember which mini is meant to represent which character, although that is easily solved in various ways that are hopefully fairly obvious. With production values in mind, an excellent decision was made by FF fan Kevin Abbotts in 2017 to create a revamped version with all-new colour box art by Mike Tenebrae, an A1-sized full-colour illustrated board, colour octagonal character tokens, illustrated item tokens, an 8-page A4 rule book, colour character cards (yay, the horrible olive green is gone) and Adventure Sheets for tracking stats etc, and even three suggested scenarios to open the concept out. He produced two professionally-printed copies, one of which was used for demo play sessions at Fighting Fantasy Fest 2 in London in September 2017, the other being gifted to Ian Livingstone. Fast forward to the COVID saga in mid-2020 and the Abbotts reboot of the game was generously made available to the general public in a hi-res print-and-play format through the Fighting Fantasy website. This new version is definitely an improvement and not just for visual reasons. The inclusion of the three scenarios takes it beyond the aim completion or just kill everybody gambit of the original, although I will say that only the pirate scenario really works for me, probably because it adds to my house rule idea of players winning points, but also because it gives the various item cards scattered around the board an additional purpose beyond just being thrown at other players as each type of item has a points value when given to the pirates, the spade (which there is only one of) being the highest so the players can engage in an item hunt alongside their own goals. Playing for points raises the game well above a simple slaughter and means anyone who cannot complete a goal for whatever reason can still theoretically win just by collecting lots of item cards and giving them to the pirates. There are however some issues with the new version that could easily have been solved: the text has many typos and a bit of proofreading would have made this look far better; the instructions for set up are on the very last page for some reason; and, the biggest problem by far, the list of NPC descriptions and purposes is completely missing meaning, to actually play the game as intended, you need to have the original as well to plug this gaping hole. Indeed, when I play I actually play in a hybrid version, with the NPCs represented by the original version's square chits (to easily distinguish them), the NPC descriptions by necessity also coming from the original, the referee uses the green character cards too from the original to track player progress and be able to know what they are trying to achieve, whilst the rest of the game uses the new version which is just visually far more arresting, is more impacting for the size difference, and has better resources for each player, plus the handy character stats/weapons tables in the new version's rule book are really useful for at-a-glance checks by the referee.
Market Mayhem, in its original Warlock form is important because it was the first of its kind and, as a melee game, was great fun and very effective. But it did not properly handle character aims and made them secondary and with no real incentive to achieve. It was very basic aesthetically though. The updated Abbotts version fully addresses the production values aspect to create a very visually impressive game. Adding the scenarios raises it above the simple outcomes of the original, but the many typos and the massive mistake by missing out all the NPC descriptions is a problem so bad that you still need the original to fix it. As a game, one of the real beauties of Market Mayhem is how adaptable it is, as you can add the suggested points system, create an infinite number of custom characters with new missions (home-made expansions basically) , and it is very simple to learn and just get on with playing. However, Warlock magazine topped this by producing a much better take on the same concept with Shuggy Hall Brawl in Issue 11 as it addressed the time vs urgency issue and added way more interesting character motivations. Shuggy Hall Brawl is the better game for this, although it is not an Allansia-set piece whereas Market Mayhem sits within the FF world and mythos is, that alone will probably make most people favour it over the later sci-fi game. Bottom line is though, that Market Mayhem is hugely enjoyable and fun and is a great gateway to more complex RPG material and also to the FF rules and concept.
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