Is Ambush at Sorinor an unsung milestone of asymmetric warfare or simply the oddest poultry-powered fantasy skirmisher ever to hobble off a 3.5-inch floppy? (Both, obviously, why else would I still be quoting its manual in 2025?) Released in 1993 by Mindcraft, the game lets six squabbling clans, ninety-plus unit types and an unsettling number of “war chickens” brawl across top-down, real-time maps where you decide whether to ambush a caravan or escort it before supper. Underrated cult classic? Absolutely, if you’re the sort who can’t resist pausing every six seconds to micromanage a squad of mermen. Overrated relic? Also yes, if your patience for early-’90s UI tops out somewhere between X-COM’s geoscape and your printer driver. Foundational to strategy gaming? It’s hardly Dune II, but try telling that to the die-hards who still debate optimal spider placement on DOS forums.
Historical Context
Mindcraft wasn’t Sega, wasn’t Sierra, wasn’t even SSI; it was that scrappy Texas shop already famous for The Magic Candle CRPGs and for Siege, the 1992 castle-stormer whose tech would fuel Ambush. Siege focused on battering or defending fortresses; Ambush flipped the premise, zeroing in on hit-and-run missions along back-country trade routes. In the same period, Syndicate was making civilians scream, Master of Magic was still compiling, and Warcraft was doodling orcs on napkins. Mindcraft’s gambit was to embrace asymmetry: one side shepherds a VIP from A to B, the other sets murderous traps, then everyone screams in VGA.
I first spotted the box in a Babbage’s display where a bronze-helmed merc lunged from shrubbery between Dark Legions and Tom & Jerry for DOS. Allowance money was earmarked for Street Fighter II tokens, so I lusted from afar until a buddy slipped me the disks via a definitely-not-legal shareware compilation. Booting it on a 486, I met the raspy digitised splash “Mindcraft Presents” and a parchment menu one gravy fingerprint away from a museum exhibit. Five minutes later a banshee unit shrieked through my no-brand Sound Blaster clone and my parents asked if the cat had taken up profanity.
Within Mindcraft’s line-up, Ambush slotted neatly between Siege’s expansion (Dogs of War) and Walls of Rome. Lore and political backstory arrived straight from The Magic Candle’s world of Deruvia; the manual devotes pages to clan feuds that might as well be Renaissance Italy with extra spiders. Reviewers were split: Computer Gaming World’s H. E. Dille scolded the AI (“Who’s really getting ambushed, the orcs or the buyer?”) while White Wolf Magazine praised its scenario variety despite a creaky campaign wrapper. And because Doom’s shareware episode dropped the same quarter, Ambush looked archaic, no first-person gore, just tasteful isometric mayhem, but to tactics gourmets it was digital catnip, the VGA equivalent of painting 28 mm miniatures at midnight.
Mechanics
The interface is a 640 × 350 riot of chunky icons. Pre-battle, you play medieval head-hunter, scanning contracts that list employer clan, payout, terrain (forest, desert, swamp, mountain, lava fields if the map designer was cranky), VIP stats and the merc roster up for hire. Elves come with longbows, trolls with club swings, mermen paddle across rivers like caffeinated otters, and those infamous war chickens sprint fast enough to outflank anything not already laughing itself unconscious.
Units deploy in squads, Close Combat-style, and terrain matters: woods cloak movement, hills extend missile arcs, rivers bog down heavy infantry unless they brought waders. Attackers get to sprinkle traps, caltrops, pitfalls, oil flasks, even spinning-blade contraptions that feel suspiciously OSHA-non-compliant. Defenders start on the open road with a VIP convoy and an escort budget that’s never adequate, like planning a wedding with five bucks and a coupon.
Real-time flow is mercifully married to a universal pause key. Tap Space, issue nested commands, ambush, regroup, swap formation, torch the forest if you hate trees, then unpause to watch the fireworks. Those nested clicks demand patience; ordering a three-step flank can feel like filing taxes while juggling daggers. Co-op hot-seat adds slapstick: my friend Chris would pause, queue twenty orders, unpause, watch one mis-click vaporise his cavalry, and howl “the cursor LIED!” Meanwhile my war chickens pecked his VIP wagons into early retirement.
Combat checks speed, attack, defence, weapon class, armour and morale. Archers loft arrows that occasionally tag allies (friendly-fire memes write themselves), sorcerers sling area spells, invisible wraiths decloak for back-stabs. The engine’s line-of-sight math per pixel row was cutting-edge in ’93, quaint now, but it means boulders give genuine cover. VIP AI, alas, behaves like a Roomba in a labyrinth: dignitaries march straight until politely stabbed, the very flaw Dille mocked. Half the tension comes from cajoling these nobles to zigzag through ambush alleys while traps glint like evil confetti.
The single-player career strings every scenario together, each success or failure nudging clan reputations up or down, which in turn unlocks richer contracts, more gold, exotic troops, maybe the right to rent siege spiders that shoot webs across half the map. Because you re-hire from scratch before every battle, bankroll management becomes a min-max puzzle. Teenage me built a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to prove war chickens deliver the best gold-per-hit ratio in coniferous terrain (yes, weekends were wild).
Maps are wonderfully fickle: fog banks that cloak units until torches flare; petrified forests that block vision but crumble under catapults; deserts where stamina melts under a noonday timer; night raids illuminated only by units carrying lanterns, creating flashlight-horror vibes years before Thief. And the scenario editor bundles every tile set and trigger, spawning fan forums dedicated to labyrinths laced with chain-reaction mushroom bombs.
Pop-culture winks abound without fabricating quotes. Dwarven sappers lug pickaxes “forged in the fires of reimbursement,” a lawyerly gag the manual slips between stat tables. Troll berserkers simply roar in raw PCM, no earlyGame of Thrones references required. Defence lawyers still exist, but instead of shouting “Objection!” they pelt enemies with writs, halving morale faster than a subpoena at a block party. And yes, war chickens cluck in glorious 8-bit when you order “Charge,” a sound so iconic someone looped it for ten hours on YouTube.
Path-finding? Think StarCraft dragoons with vertigo. Mountain spiders can cliff-crawl yet decide to moon-walk back down if morale dips; cavalry waver at stream crossings as though negotiating overtime. Fortunately pause-and-reissue salvages most fiascos, but nothing beats the comedy of a perfect ambush undone because one goblin jammed the movement queue like a bad LAN driver.
Legacy and Influence
Why didn’t Ambush dethrone Warcraft? Budget, marketing and that brutal learning curve. Mindcraft had no TV spots, and right-click simplicity was the new hotness just as Ambush demanded nested icons. Yet its fingerprints linger. The asymmetric squad skirmish re-emerged in Dawn of War II; Arrowhead’s Magicka channels the “friendly-fire plus comedy” DNA; the pre-battle deployment zones in Total War feel like elaborate cousins to Ambush’s trap-placement ritual, though Creative Assembly omitted poultry on purpose.
Inside Mindcraft, lessons rolled into Walls of Rome, while coder-composer James Fristrom later helped design Spider-Man 2’s celebrated web-swing. Sales were modest, roughly sixty thousand units worldwide by collector estimates, yet the cult never died. The Good Old Days archive still receives fresh essays, and retro LAN parties often feature laptops alt-tabbing between Discord chat and Excel gold-per-unit trackers. Spreadsheets, it seems, are forever.
The game stays niche because it asks much: read the 130-page manual, remember hotkeys, embrace the idea that one misplaced pit trap erases an evening’s wage. Modern players nurtured on slick tutorials might bounce the first time a VIP strolls into caltrops. But for those who persevere, Ambush becomes tabletop-wargame heroin, each mission a puzzle begging to be min-maxed and meme-ified.
Closing Paragraph + Score
So crank up DOSBox, cue the parchment menu and listen for that legendary war-chicken cluck. Half an hour later you’ll either rage-quit at Roomba-brained VIPs or grin madly as a spiderweb barrage pins a royal convoy like an insect in amber. Ambush at Sorinor is fiddly, funny, unforgiving, and never, ever dull. It’s the strategy world’s cult VHS: grainy, quotable, bizarrely re-watchable, and prone to leaving feathers in your disc drive.
Final verdict: 7.5 out of 10, a flawed yet fascinating relic whose war chickens still peck holes in my productivity. Clan Alingdor just posted a new contract, and hazard pay for poultry wranglers isn’t going to earn itself.