Uploaded July 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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odySim v.01e
Card # 4, 5, 6 Magnavox Odyssey
number of players 4 (Versus)
Designer: Ralph Baer.
strategy
Description from: old-computers.com


Invasion is a strategy game surely inspired by famous board game Risk.

The world of Invasion is a small map with 12 territories each containing a castle (see game board picture below). Surrounding the land portion of the map is an ocean perimeter. The land part of the world gets divided up and everyone gets an equal number of castles. The object of the game is to take over everyone else's castles using your armies. You can attack any castle if it is immediately adjacent to one of your castles. After capturing a castle you get to draw a loot card which gives you gold. Use the gold to buy more armies or to buy a ship which you can use to transport armies to attack castles that aren't immediately adjacent to your already conquered land.

Attacking a castle is the videogame part, using the Odyssey. There are two phases: external and internal attacks. The external attack can be a direct attack or a sneak attack.

The direct attack is the only time you directly face-off against an opponent using the Odyssey. The duel is simply this: The attacker sends the ball spot across the screen at the highest speed possible, and attempts to wiggle it, using ENGLISH, past the defender who can only use their vertical control to block it.

The sneak attack involves maneuvering your player spot, while it is invisible, from the bottom center of the screen to either north corner of the on-screen castle so that it covers the door there.

For the internal attack, you start the spot in the center of the screen. Your opponent blanks the spot (by holding down their reset button) while you shift your horizontal/verticle controls enough so that you think that spot will now materialize on top of one of the four guard towers of the castle on the Überlay. The reset button is released and the ball spot slides in from off-screen too, hopefully, symbolize a destruction of all the defenders.

This game uses carts #4, #5 and #6 for the various attacks. It comes with a game board, two overlays, a deck of loot cards and at least 300 little tokens representing your armies.

Invasion is more a board game with videogame interludes than a pure videogame. Games can last very, very long...

grab the simulator here:
odysim.blogspot.com
you can read the game manual here:
archive.org/stream/Invasion_1972_Magnavox_US#page/n0/mode/2up

You can visit the odysim creator channel for more info about games and great new homebrew of the Magnavox odysseyodysim here:
youtube.com/channel/UCvGTsHpp3R6eoiDjR1TxONw
overlay pictures were taken from here:
magnavox-odyssey.com/Invasion.htm