Dark Legions is one of my favorite games. It has literally no story at all (in-game, at least; the manual has a small snippet of a story to contextualiza the matches), but I simply love the gameplay; it's one of those "chess-like" games where you move your pieces on a board, and when two opposing pieces fall on the same square, you switch to a battlefield where you control your piece and must defeat the enemy in real-time combat. It's a bit like Archon (which I also love), but you could actually build your army the way you wanted, choosing from 16 different pieces that had a wide range of powers (the Vampire being my absolute favorite depiction of these monsters in anything ever). You could also but things like special rings to improve the stats of your troops, and traps to litter across the battlefield. They even have a day-to-night cycle (day time weakens undead troops and make living troops stronger, night time does the opposite), and head-to-head multiplayer (unusual for a dos game from that time), although this makes certain units and all traps pretty pointless (unless you order your friend to close their eyes when it's your turn).
It's a pity that this genre of games basically died. There was one for PS1 (Unholy War) and one for the PS2 (Wrath Unleashed), and one chess game that had a game mode with this concept (Battle Chess), and while they were all pretty good (specially Wrath), I really wanted a remake of Dark Legions... or at least a patch to correct some balance issues (nerf the Demon a bit ffs that thing is way to over powered).
It's very easy to run the game using DosBox, and since it's abandonware, you can download it with no problems. You'll also need to download the manual, since everytime you start the game it'll ask for a specific word from somewhere in it before allowing you to play (lol anti-piracy from the 90's), but you can usually find it along with the game for download.
Err, since the game is abandonware it's fine to talk about downloading it, yes?
