| Designer(s) | Tom Glass |
|---|---|
| Genre(s) | Simulation |
| Modes | Single player, Multiplayer |
Oil Barons is both a strategy and simulation-type, turn-based, published by Epyx in 1983. It was released for the Apple II, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS computers. It is considered to be one of the rarest of all Epyx games.
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Flier for Oil Barons and other games.
Gameplay
Oil Barons represents an unusual fusion between a computer game and a board game, in that it included a game board consisting of a 50 X 40 square grid, as well as numerous individual game tokens, used to denote the significance of various grid locations (which corresponded to various terrain-specific locations within the game).
Oil Barons was thus much like a numerically complex board game, in which the computer kept track of the numerous variables. The game could be played in any one of several modes, and with from one to eight players.
Unfortunately, the fact this game has been out-of-print since the mid-1980s, and thus very few people today have an Oil Barons game board and tokens (particularly in light of the fact that only a very small number of copies were sold when it was in publication), potentially limits the game's appeal in contemporary times.