The Digital Antiquarian - 19 Jun 2026

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In the meantime, though, I sort of promised you a Goldilocks game right there in the title of this article, didn't I? I'm a hard guy to please by this point in my life, after playing games for more than 40 years, but I'm not a hopelessly jaded player. It is possible to strike a balance that makes me happy, as Heroes of Might and Magic proves... and as does Disciples: Sacred Lands.

The narrator's voice here always makes me a do a double-take, because it reminds me so much of that of the Irish poet Paul Durcan, who lent his talent's to Van Morrison's "In the Days Before Rock 'n' Roll."

Disciples comes to us by way of a Canadian company called Strategy First, which was founded in Montreal around 1990 by Don McFatridge and Steve Wall. After playing supporting roles in the industry for a number of years, they decided to try to make a go of it as a full-fledged developer and publisher late in the decade, peddling lower-budget, nichier games than those that tended to interest the established publishers. Disciples, which was released at about the same time as Age of Wonders, was created by a small French-Canadian studio, previously known as Micomeq, which Strategy First had recently acquired.

The game was designed by one Danny Belanger. Sometimes dismissed by reviewers even today as just a low-budget Heroes of Might and Magic clone, it actually has a mind and personality that are very much its own. Its most obvious fresh idea is its approach to territorial gain, the source of its subtitle. (The name "Disciples," on the other hand, has nothing much to do with anything here as far as I can tell; the developers seem to have chosen it just because they thought it sounded cool.) You don't manually tag the gold and mana sources on the map with your armies to claim them for yourself, as you do in most other games of this style. Instead there is a zone of influence around each town a player owns, which widens its circumference gradually at a rate of one square per turn. This process continues until the expanding circle of influence is blocked, by the territory of a rival, a border of the map, or a mountain range, ocean, or other impassible landmark. Thanks to this system, you can tell from a glance at the map which faction is winning: the human Empire's territory is lush green, the Undead Horde's bleak and dark, the dwarven Mountain Clan's a snowy white, and the Legions of the Damned's a fiery red. In fact, many of the scenarios have victory conditions that crown as the winner the first faction whose terrain fills a given percentage of the map. It's a unique and enjoyable mechanic, with the potential added bonus of staving off the late-game tedium of conquering the last few enemy towns left on the map.

The symbol of the evil Legion of the Damned faction (as seen on the mini-map at top right here) is the Danish flag. I'm not sure what to make of that...

Doing a clean sweep of the whole map would be almost impossible anyway, because each faction's capital comes complete with a single super-strong unit that cannot be moved but is virtually impossible to defeat. In effect, then, you never really have to worry about losing your capital. This is especially nice in multiplayer sessions, as it means that no one has to suffer the indignity of being knocked out of the game early and then sitting around waiting for the other players to finish, feeling like the world's biggest loser all the while.

As in Heroes of Might and Magic, units here can only move if led by a hero. Each of these can have from zero to five subordinates, depending on his or her Leadership level. In another break from other games of this general type, even the underlings here are explicitly cast as individuals, not groups, and have the ability to level up and get stronger just like the main heroes as they fight battles and win experience points, as long as you have built the appropriate upgrades in your capital to enable their advancement. (These features led Strategy First to call Disciples a full-fledged CRPG in some of their press materials, but this is going rather too far.) Each faction has a different selection of hero and underling types that can be purchased in its towns - as many of each as you can afford - and then further customized as they gain levels. (Pro tip: more Leadership is always the right choice for your heroes whenever it's available.) The game is quite well-balanced on the whole, with no faction having a truly decisive advantage.

Now, to address the Goldilocks in the room: there is tactical combat in the game, but it's extremely simple even in comparison to Heroes of Might and Magic, much less Age of Wonders. Each unit has exactly one attack to inflict upon its enemies, or, in the case of defensive units, one heal or one buff to apply to its comrades. Your job in combat entails nothing more than deciding whom your units hurt or help when their turns come up, by clicking the appropriate enemy or friend. Maneuvering on the battlefield is not a consideration, for the very good reason that it's impossible. The whole exercise is so ridiculously simple that at first you might think it rote, nothing but a more click-intensive version of Warlord's automated battles. Give it a chance, though, and you'll find that it's not entirely bereft of Sid Meier's proverbial Interesting Decisions. Whom do you choose to attack first? Whom do you heal or buff? These decisions can be the difference between victory and defeat in a close fight.

The combat screen. I've just hit all of my enemies with an area attack, although my hero missed one of the polar bears. (Ah, well... we're supposed to be trying to save the polar bears, right?) Two members of my party here are specters, who paralyze a single opponent for one turn rather than damage him. I just have to decide whom to paralyze. That's where some dilemmas start to creep in...

There's a magic system here too, a highly streamlined take on the Master of Magic approach. You have to research spells before you can cast them. You can't use these spells in battle (other than if your unit has a "built-in" magic spell as its one and only move), but you can use them on the strategic map to soften up enemy stacks before you attack them, to buff your own units, or to do other things, such as revealing a section of map hidden by the fog of war or, conversely, hiding a piece of it from your opponents once again. With the tactical combat being so basic, success often hinges on what you do before a fight begins.

The spell book. Each faction has one type of mana that it favors and its own unique set of spells to research. The only way to obtain other spells is to trade for them.

Disciples isn't what anyone would call an overly complex game, but it has more subtleties to it than you might think. Dorte and I had more fun with this game in multi-player mode than we have with any since Heroes III. (She found Warlords III too ugly and dull and Age of Wonders too complicated to want to play them with me.) We're not particularly cut-throat competitors, especially against one another, so we appreciated being able to approach the scenarios more as a race for third-party towns and territory than a mano a mano fight to the death.

Of course, there are aspects of the game that could stand improvement. On the whole, Disciples's flaws are the inevitable byproducts of a small team working within a budget of well under $1 million Canadian. The artificial intelligence of your enemies could be better, as could the single-player campaigns in general. There are four of these, one for each faction, albeit consisting of just four scenarios each. I found them to be pretty much incomprehensible in terms of narrative, just a lot of portentous word-salad speechifying adding up to nothing. They must relate to one another somehow, must be parts of some grander story, but I certainly couldn't explain it to you even after watching all of the cutscenes on YouTube. Nor do I care enough to want to try - which is always the worst indictment anyone can level against any piece of fiction, isn't it?

Within the campaign scenarios, the developers attempt to compensate for the poor artificial intelligence by stacking the odds more and more wildly against you; this is, in other words, another one of those asymmetric strategy games which SSG so decried. Even so, I never found the one campaign I actually completed - that of the Empire faction - all that taxing.

The capital-management screen for the Mountain Clans. It changes as you build more structures, but to tell the truth that's something I scarcely notice. The graphics in this game aren't actively bad, but are kind of anonymous-looking, with a palette dominated by dull browns and grays.

The above means that Disciples is easier for me to recommend as a game to play with a friend or two than as a single-player experience. When played with others, the stupid enemies no longer matter so much and the disarmingly elegant core rules are allowed to shine. Disciples hits that sweet spot of being easy to pick up but... okay, not exactly hard to master, but not trivial either. I love it when I discover a new game that Dorte and I can enjoy together. And it's always great to see a small team with original ideas come up with something as well put-together as this. The graphics and sound they could afford are not those of a AAA game - not even a AAA game from 1999 - but they're just good enough not to be actively distracting, living somewhere between those of Warlords III and Age of Wonders.

Everyone's mileage will vary, but for me, Disciples is the keeper of this trio. Fast-playing and straightforward, it's the perfect game to share with someone else on the patio on a warm summer day in between sipping on a cool beverage and shooting the breeze. I like it. I like it quite a lot. And I very much look forward to trying out Disciples II.

Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: This article is a bit more experiential than a product of deep research, but there are a few online sources that proved exceptionally useful. These are The Wargaming Scribe's write-up of SSG and Reach for the Stars, an old Gamespy piece by John Keefer on "Developer Origins," a Game Daily interview with Don McFatridge, a Home LAN interview with McFatridge, and a Kotaku interview with Steve Fawkner. Also the February/March 2000 issue of the French magazine Cyber Stratege.

Where to Get Them: Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Age of Wonders, and Disciples: Sacred Lands are all available as digital purchases at GOG.com.

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/06/the-goldilocks-principle-in-fantasy-strategy/