In this game, I spent my childhood and I really happy that this legendary turn-based strategy is in Steam.
All lovers of old-school strategies, join it.

This game is as fun as the old Heroes of Might & Magic series or Disciples. I think it's very underrated. Deserves much more popularity...

One of my fave games of this style, highly recommend.

Insane fantasy 4x game with great multiplayer options!!! Random scenario generation and MODs make for tons of fun but beware, it's is quite difficult. Scales well to 1080p despite being ~12 years old.

One of the best strategy games of all times if not the best. A turn based game that is nearly perfect at all levels. The game conquered my heart with its great ambiances and environments, magical songs, beautifully animated 2D units, great scenario, original playable races, badass characters, well-made dialogs and difficulty level. I consider this as the hardest strategy game that I have played. Custom scenarios were amazing and the editor tool was so easy to use. I ended up crating new maps although there were no one to play with. Imagine Warcraft III and Civilization IV combined.. No you don't need to imagine, because this game exists!

Cat humanoids called Tigrans, out of this world creatures Syrons, Dragonians, Arabian and Turkish inspired people Nomads, arctic hobbits, evil bug like creations Shadow Demons... Even goblins had their own race... All these original races are so remarkable and unforgottable and playing with them is still fun and intense even after a total of ten years.

Be whoever you want to be, add a character bio, put your photoshopped picture on it, create new heroes and lead them to fight... Fight aganst good or evil, it does not matter, because you don't always get to play with good leaders. Be an evil Elven wizard or be a heavenly good Orcish shaman. Summon beholders, elementals, dragons and crack the earth under their feet while you separate their army with your tornados.

Go deep in the woods, find camps and ask them if they want to join you. If they answer "No" then kill all of them and take their money. Get ready for more adventure, visit old ruins that are full of zombies and skeletons, steal baby dragons from their mothers, hire a drunk Dwarven engineer from tavern to protect you and improve their fighting skills in arena. Explore sunken shipwrecks and kill pirates, or just simply be a pirate!

Visit beautifully made underworld to catch some outlaws and find new allies, like Goblins, Tigrans and Dwarves. Trade spells with their leaders and expand your empire. Banish terrestrial beings from their homes and get extra money from it. Be a bad person for once in your life! They'll hate you, they'll talk about you and they'll fear you and your undead champions! Raze cities and loot them! Destroy empires and rise yours!

Open the doors of engineering schools and buy some flame throwers and baloons to fly over the mountain. Order them to build up a tank for you! Move your army into the tank and raze enemy's wall and ruin their buildings over their head, because you know that they deserve it!

Teleport to the Shadow world, exterminate all evil and good spirits! Stamp big insects, larvas and feel the beauty of this place. Help Syron giants and occupy demonic cities with their power. Enjoy the game, enjoy the gameplay, enoy the song, enjoy every step you make, every unit you kill and every hero you hire, every city you conquer, every mountain you climb, every cave you explore, every turn you make... Enjoy it!

I would recommend anyone who enjoys turn based games to give Shadow Magic a shot. It is a of game that superficially seems rather simplistic with its movements and hex board, but upon closer inspection a plethora of various elements are revealed. This game can give several tactics, such as creating an amphibious army of dwarves, a flying army of leprechauns, and explosive goblins. The balance between unit production and economic policy focus is just right. The only downside that I could say about this game is the possibility that, due to how attacks and damage rolls are done, luck can ruin your day. That and heroes are arrow and bullet magnets because of how powerful they can be if they aren't restrained. Needless to say, these do not detract from the possibility of fielding an army of flying hobbits that can rain havoc and drop flaming meteors on fiendish skeletons. If that has any sort of appeal to you, pick this game up. And do note that there is a sequel, Age of Wonders 3, in the works.

I have to say, this game is the end all, be all for turn based strategy games for me. As a long time fan of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, as well as other less well received TBS games, this one continues to shine and take up space on my hard drive. This purchase marks the 3rd time that I've bought the game. One hard copy, once on GOG, and now the steam version, almost soley so that I can review this bad boy. First of all, forget the campaigns. Games like these were MADE for the random maps. The campaigns, while entertaining, are really just long tutorials to ready you for the random map generator, which is where this game shines. 12 races, multiple combinations of magi, and a multitude of play styles lay before you. That enemy city before you just a little too tough to take? Scorch their lands and transform them to deserts and watch their populace riot from their discontent at their new, inhospitable world. A mountainrange in your way? Level the terrain and march your troops across it, backdooring your opponent into new depths of discontent. That being said, play it with your friends to elevate this game to the height that it deserves. This is the ultimate multiplayer strategy game. Get your friends together and LAN this game. You won't regret it.
After purchasing AOW III, I have to admit, while that game IS awesome, I still make time in my day to go back to Shadow Magic. It's well worth the time. Every ♥♥♥♥ing time. Stop reading this now and go buy this game. If you're a turn based strategy person, or just a strategy gamer at all, you owe it to yourself to play this game. Good luck, and may your wizard towers provide you all the spell range you require!

Disclaimer: I have literally played hundreds (and I don't mean one or two) of hours of this game and expect to play hundreds more. Buy it. you won't regret it.

A Civilization type game with Tolkeinesque races, such as Elves, Dwarves, Undead etc. Despite being ten years old, I still find it to be the best of its type.

Very similar to most other turn based strategy games, although the difficulty can be a barrier for new players. You control a race, build\control cities, produce armies and buildings and spend time either allying or destroying other races.

You control a Wizard on the map who acts as the races leader. Should the Wizard die without any means to revive, your race is defeated.

You can take over mines, mills, farms etc on the world map to give you gold per turn. You can use that gold to build and train units, however you have to be aware of how much your spending. Once you've trained units, you also need to pay them a wage per turn. If you don't have enough gold, they may get disgruntled and leave you - possible joining up with your foes! I like this because, rather than just duking it out on a battlefield, you can work on removing your enemies resources and forcing his army to dwindle without ever facing open war.

Bad points: the AI often makes nonsense moves, and the diplomacy towards AI is irrational - often they will offer an alliance, before instantly breaking it and declaring war against you. The Steam edition doesn't come with the MASSIVE manual that came with the CD version, so it's worth flicking through an online wiki to get to grips with the game. A tutorial is there, but it's pretty brief.

Best played against humans. There's online options, as well as a play by email function which I prefer and tend to be quite active on. The community is still going strong after so long, and maps can still be downloaded. Age of Wonders III is due in 2014, so if this looks too dated for you, might be worth holding out for that.

Props again to my friend Red for gifting me this game. I'm actually going to make this review for Age of Wonders II, and this game as well...

The Age of Wonders series is a classic all-time favorite of mine in the case of the two, a challenging and enchanting strategy 4X game with spells, dragons, warriors, armies, everything. It allows you to personalize what kind of wizard you want to play as, how hard the enemies are, the setting you want to fight in, etc.. Haven't played through the campaigns fully for either, though. Nontheless, Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne, and it's Expansion-turned-sequel, Shadow Magic, are games that Fantasy and Strategy fans alike will be spellbound by. Shadow Magic also definately took what AoWII had, and did some improving touch ups on it but still made sure not to fix what isn't broke. But still tried some different things with new additions for bonuses and tactics. Such as looping the limited production queue if you want to build an army, but the production que is overflown.

For both nostalgia and quality related reasons, an impressive 9/10 to both games.

My elves rebelled against me because I have too many goblins in my nation, clearly this game advocates racism, and encourages only having one, unified, white race. Incidently it is also sexist, somehow.

I can't stand playing this sexist, racist, anti-american trash. This game corrupts our youth to burn the flag and give up our guns to make way for "peace" and "commerce", clearly a product of Al Qaeda and if you even consider yourself a true american, you should burn this game at the stake and demand censorship.

Game is also very very fun and I can not stop playing, totally recommend buying it

Age of Wonders Shadow Magic is a relatively unknown gem of a game. The entire game is turn-based, with the action happening at the strategic and tactical levels. As was normal for games of years past, this is a game where you will spend the vast majority of time poring over the hex-based maps; this holds true at the "world" level as well as the "battle" level.

A few things make it stand out of the pack. At it's core the Strategic level plays out VERY similar to a "civilization-lite" style game; establish cities, build and upgrade various structures, research "tech" (in this case various spells), and expand your empire across the map. On top of that, your faction leader can direclty influence gameplay through the casting of spells; some of these are "global", affecting the entirety of the map (or targetable upon an opponent), others are "permanent" (enchantments upon units), and yet others are direct-combat use (more on this later). Adding to this is a (VERY LIGHT) diplomacy and alignment component that can affect your race's interaction with other races; some races will ally with, some will tolerate, and others will outright rebel. The resoureces are limited to two; gold and mana. Both are generated through your settlements as well as from capturable nodes.

On top of a pretty good strategy-level is the tactical battle level. Rather than moving a stack of your units into a stack of enemy units and hoping you win (by the way, auto-resolve is available, but NOT recommended), the battles take place on another hex-based map. The terrain of these battlefields is directly based on the "world map" terrain as well; one of the weak points is the limited amount of maps that are available (a city map is the same for each person, with cosmetic changes based on the race of the owning city). However, environmental factors can impact the battles; for example, fire nodes will inginte all units dealing damage over time. Army stacks are limited to 8 units (8 individuals) per stack, but with proper placement (FLANKING) you can bring 2-3 stacks to bear at at time. Once the battles start, they play out very similar to a game of chess (or Final Fantasy Tactics, if you prefer). Each unit has movement allowances and various actions. Hero units up the ante on this with additional abilities, and ALL units can advance with experience earned (a couple racial units depend on levelling to "grow" into stronger units). Additionally, once engaged in battle, you can cast spells directly against units (or on your units to heal/buff/etc). Ultimately rather than relying on abstract stacks of units playing number wars, this game allows for a player with small unit tactical proficiency to shine.

The game comes with several campaigns, a couple dozen one-off scenarios, and the gem of it all; a pretty customizable random map generator. One can make an extremely large map with nothing but deserts and mountains (if so inclined), or a small forest map, or anything in between. Additionally, the random map allows for additional "layers" (underground and shadow realm) that maximize on some of the races' inherent abilites, adding more options and replayability.

AOW:SM is an older title, and one that will probably slip into obscurity. However, if you see it on-sale give it a go; for 5-10 bucks, you could do FAR worse and get MUCH less playability from a title.

I wish there were more games like that one today. Tryed fallen enchentress... not even close.

Great game but very buggy on modern systems. Your mileage may vary. If there were a way to try it out before purchasing I would recommend doing that just to make sure it runs properly.

It still gets a recommendation from me as the game itself is excellent. It would be nice if they released a patch to iron out the new bugs but given this game's age I don't think that's going to happen.

The Age of Wonders is a terrific series with great turn-based strategy gameplay. The campaign mode in this game is terrific, considerably better than most of the newer turn-based fantasy titles.

Well worth the purchase.

For those of you who enjoy the tickling effervescence of vintage animation with your gaming bouquet, I highly recommend AoW:SW. A much less popular side-shoot of the "Heroes of Might and Magic" series, this turn-based strategy game dominates its mainstream counterparts in faction balance and gameplay mechanics like actual tactical battle interfaces and strategic use of the player's actual influence and control on the worldmap itself. Considering its price and the fact I've personally spent over 60 hours on it and intend to spend much more, this is a 5 of 5.

Amazing game that will never grow old in my heart

A very well-made spiritual successor to Master of Magic. Addictive gameplay, nice simultaneous-turns multiplayer as a bonus and still sweet graphics.

Age of Wonders is one of the best Turn Based Strategy Games ever created. I would even go so far as to say it is better than Heroes of Might and Magic.

This is a great game for strategy game fans. It has all the aspects of a quality strategy game, and I have enjoyed my experience with it thoroughly. Although, I think that those who aren't too big on games like Civ and Age of Empires will find this game boring, and should steer in a different direction. If you plan on buying the previous games in this series, know that this is by far the most polished and enjoyable. If you love strategy games like I do, you will have fun with the whole series. But if you simply like to play an hour or two every few days of strategy-based games I recommend only buying Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Overall, this is a great game and those of you who enjoy strategy RPGs will have a blast playing this game.

Anyone who likes strategy games will love this game. There is also a interesting story involving strang and terrorfying shadow-creatures from a evil realm. the gameplay is great and I love turn-based strategt games like this and if you like the sound of this you should get it :)