Got an interesting package a few weeks ago, the ACKS system. This is a sort of OSR retro-clone that has the expected two lower levels of play with dungeoning, progressing into exploration, and then the game takes a hard left turn and goes fully into a Civilization (the PC game) style of kingdom management and creation. I am also reminded a little of the old Master of Magic style of game, or any of those "conquer, monsters, and magic" style of PC games on Steam.
It is a fascinating game and I haven't seen this done to the extent this game dives into the subject. There are a number of custom changes to the rules, spells, and classes to make them work better in mass battles. For instance fighters were rebalanced to make higher-level heroes a more potent force against small units. The fireball was dialed back some in blast radius to keep it from being a mass battle-ending spell. It is still useful, just not overly powerful in the context of having mages on the battlefield supporting medieval infantry.
There is a lot of cool and different kingdom management stuff in this game. Even if you use just the kingdom management parts with your favorite B/X or OSR rules set it is a cool read and makes you think about the higher level empire-building game. Where a lot of B/X games feel like they pay lip service to the "attracting followers and establishing strongholds" point of the game at high level, this one dives in and explores that part of the play experience.
I do feel the game, by the rules, is solid and is worth a play to see the changes they made to the rules and tweaks they made to make everything work. It is interesting to see high-level play and mass battles considered as part of the overall play experience, and see how that changes some of the traditional classes and spells we have grown so accustomed to doing X or Y and then no real testing or play with those on the epic kingdom level was done so they just kind of stayed how they were as "dungeon spells."
There is a lot of innovation in the OSR world and this is why limiting your experience to a reprinted official set of rules, the current OSR community favorite, or strictly following B/X (or one flavor of B/X) may keep you from having cool new experiences and perspectives on what old school gaming can be. Of course, I speak as someone who had played them all when they came out, and there are players who doesn't know the wonders of the older games, so I don't discourage that exploration at all.
It is always useful to think of B/X and OSR as Unix/Linux, and borrow, add to, use the best parts of, and jury rig to your heart's content. This is how gaming was in the old days, and we hacked games and made them our own out of several systems and built unique games and sets of Frankenrules that were fun, pulled in cool stuff from several systems, and were completely ours.
There are a lot of cool systems out there to explore, and they have a lot to offer. And in the OSR and B/X style world, a lot is cross compatible or borrowed from various parts of games to create a unique experience.
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