This is the Dallas roleplaying game box set. Yes, you read that right. Further proof, if you needed it, that no one had a clue what they were doing in the early days of roleplaying games.

For you youngins, Dallas was a late night TV soap opera about an endlessly feuding family – the Ewings – in the Texas oil business. It premiered in 1978 and ran until 1991. It was an immediate sensation. One episode from 1980, the same year this game came out, remains the second highest rated prime time show ever.  

The Dallas RPG was famed wargame maker SPI’s attempt to capitalize on the TV show’s success while introducing RPGs to a new audience outside the hobby’s well-established niche and they bet big, publishing 80,000 of the boxes. It was a dismal failure.

It is a strange game, designed by legendary wargame designer James F. Dunnigan. Characters are pre-generated and, obviously, based on the ones from the show. There are a number of statistics, each with a dual value (so, you can be good at seducing but bad at resisting seduction) and conflict is mostly resolved by comparing them (dice come into play if the opposing numbers are too close). It isn’t reaaaally an RPG by the definition of its era, though you might find some shared DNA in modern storytelling games. It feels a bit more like a rudimentary, narrative-driven card to me, though.

Its a strange one. SPI was out of business by 1982, thanks to a dirty deal with TSR, and I can’t help but wonder if Dallas put the company in the dire financial straights that led to its demise.