Age of Wonders/YMMV

• Accidental Innuendo: It's jokingly rumored among the fandom that the reason for the High Men's change of name in the sequel to Archons is due to the original name's similar pronunciation to a certain component of the female genitalia.
• Awesome but Impractical: The Spirit of War may reward quests with some useful spells like Hellfire and Fireball but his quests are often Stupid Evil Violations of Common Sense and he'll put you at odds with the far more practical Spirit of Order.
  • The spells Hellfire and Tremor damage everything on the battlefield, including city structures you might have planned on using. The former is useful in moderation, though, as machines are weak to fire.
• Character Alignment: Ultimately a battle between good and evil with the neutral races playing wild card. In The Wizard's Throne, alignment is now determined by whatever the dominant alignment of your forces is, rather than by your own stats. During the Wizard's throne you cycle between good and evil and back again in an attempt to restore the Balance Between Good And Evil.
• Crowning Moment of Funny: the entire third game is made of this to the point where it's almost impossible to take it seriously. Every second hero says something absurdly ridiculous when first introduced, every second road sign is a joke, every second unit description is dripping with sarcasm and that's not even talking about the running gags and brick jokes littered all over the game maps.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The game had quite a plenty good music tracks.
• Designated Hero / Designated Villain: We're told that the Elves, Halflings and Dwarves are good, and the Orcs, Goblins and Dark Elves evil, but they don't play any differently. While the good races are described briefly as having peaceful wholesome habits and the evil races are supposed to be violent and aggressive, we don't really see this in action either. Finally, the Elves' goal is peace while the Dark Elves want genocide of the humans, but they want the genocide because the humans did it to them first. This kind of retribution doesn't necessarily fall outside the realm of what many "good" characters do. And in gameplay the difference doesn't show up at all: both sides are equally warlike, and have the option of fighting or buying off neutral races. Furthermore, a central gameplay mechanic is the ability to repopulate captured cities with a population of a friendly race; it's plain cultural imperialism at best and the good and evil races do this with equal impunity.
  • Never mind the fact that "good" races enslave the population of their enemies just like the evil ones.
• One Man Party: Thanks to a couple of GameBreakers, a properly customized hero is basically invincible. It's possible to beat the entire single player campaign, as well as most AI skirmishes, using only a single unit.
• That One Level: The first and third dwarf missions of the first game's campaign start you with few resources and run you through huge mazes of dark, enemy filled tunnels to reach specific points on the map. If you don't know exactly how to get to the goal, it's easy to either spread your forces too thin or get lost, both of which give the enemy time to build up strong forces undisturbed.