weird board games

ii. A game called Swindle, where you played a Lovejoy type character which a poorly moulded plastic head and had to bid for various antiques whilst trying to guess whether they were real or a Swindle! (You got to shout out Swindle! loudly if you thought you were being diddled). It was rubbish, and the Ming Vase that came with it got bust after two weeks.

iii. Escalado, in a car boot sale, repleat with the "lick me and go mad" lead horses. I saw someone playing it once and the "Exciting Game Of Horse Racing" resembled nothing less than an earthquake in a French abbatoir.

ii. None. I don't really remember ever playing board games at friends' houses

iii. Again, none. Oh, I think I wanted the Game of Life when I was about 10 and missed Careers (which was at my grandparents' house) but I soon realised that it was modern, tacky and horrid.

Speculation:- The stock market trading game, (so boring).

Kensington:- what the hell was that about? Weird hexagonal draughts sort of thing.

Appearing this christmas was share dealing monopoly, which never got played due to the extreme complexity of the rules and funny little computer thing that came with it needing batteries.

ii. I was that strage friend.

iii. I have always wanted to play shogi, japanese chess, however i don't even have the mind for european chess.

Family Fibbers

I would also like to mention my complete and utter hatred of Scrabble. This game is totally anti-style, for instance you could come up with a word like article and score very little, whislt some elase gets axe lands on a triple word score and wins the whole game. Its all about attrition and it's just down right nasty. I'm bitter.

Me n sis used to play this one all the time around 80-84, but we couldn't find it anywhere in shops. It came from some charity sale thing. You played an aspiring pop group with a crappy car that could only go a few places at a time on the board representing London. More gigs you played = better placing in chart = more money. SPend money on better car to go to more gigs, or on recording better song? etc.

We were only people to own:

- The Peter Rabbit Race Game: immensely long snakes-and-ladders thing replicating plots of 4 books. You played one of 4 Potter characters and each faced different challenges on a different track (the board was massive). The thing was the tracks were of difft lengths and some were really difficult - if you got Peter you were fucked, if you got J. Fisher you were home free. Also there was an option to do all four tracks thus creating a game 500 spaces long! I loved it aged 5 my parents understandably did not.

- Mystic Wood - you are a knight and have to go through the mystic wood. Board changes every time.

- Judge Dredd The Boardgame (this was a bit later) - fantastically good game, lots of scope for arsing up other players in entertaining fashion.

My weird friend has:

- The Euro Game. (OK not a board game). A friend of mine had Buccanneer the most tedious game ever (pirate themed too - what a missed opportunity!).

I envied:

When I was very small I played at playgroup a game involving bees getting pollen from a flower. The colours were so beautiful and the dice was all multi-coloured, and I wanted it so badly but we could never find a copy. I think it was a bit like Snails Pace Race for those 'in the know'.

We had that too, Tom. I'd forgotten all about it.

This is much better than TV nostalgia.

The Pac-man board game!!!!!

Now: "Gazza: the Game", a classic charity shop find dating from immediately post-Italia '90 Gazzamania. The man himself is described as "Football's world-class sensation" which seems an odd thing to say. It's a football-pitch-divided-into-squares-use-cards-with- particular-moves-to-get-near-the-goal game, which rewards BIG HOOFS UP THE PITCH. It teaches kids to play football the right way.

Best weird board game I had was The Escape From New York game, which was of course based on the John Carpenter film. I was so obsessed with all things "Escape From New York" (that was my first R-rated movie, plus I read the novelization of the film twice!). The game was a map of Manhattan cut into this different sectors, and both the President and the tape were hiding somewhere under one of the spaces. You had to tool around the island looking for these things, battling the villains from the film along the way. Like the film, there was a time element, only so many turns before the capsules in your blood stream disintegrated and killed you. It was an EXCELLENT game with serious repeat playability.

Did anyone have Dark Tower? Lucky fucker if so. Game I most envied from American comics.

Another great board game was Stop, Thief! The board itself was an aerial view of the city block. A handheld computer had tracked the thief's movements on the game board, giving different sounds for different kinds of movement. You had to pay attention to the sequence of sounds, watch the board for where they may have occurred, and then get to the space and "make an arrest" (it was like the thief was invisible.) Sometimes you had the right space, but the thief would get away, and take the subway somewhere across town. Very exciting.

I badly wanted to get a game called THE BUSINESS GAME but my family baulked, tho my sister still remembers and teases me abt it (ie as = most boring board game ever devised hence yes i wd love it)

i always envied friends who had mousetrap though i can't remember actually playing the game, just the interminable setting up of the board.

i’ve never seen Kensington but I vaguely remember having a ‘cool 80s’ game that had clear plastic triangles (or squares) with markings on; you had to match them up in some way to win. it may well have been rubbish.

haha also a game with dice of my dad's called WFF'n'PROOF, where instead of numbers there were symbols from boolean algebra, you each threw yr dice (five or six of them), and the game was WHO COULD MAKE THE LONGEST WELL-FORMED FORMULA (eg logically true boolean equation) within a given time.

I believe i played it w.my dad once. He got it from an ad in scientific american - i cannot think why (he is hopeless at maths). I wanted him to get one of those things to check yr own alpha waves

One game called something futuristic like "2010" or "2100" which was like something out of The Adventure Game. You had a magnetic mine field (strips of plastic you jumbled up) in a 5x5 or 6x6 grid and plastic counters that you placed. one at a time, then moved around. the counters were hollow with little magnets painted red on one side and yellow on the other. if a square-edged counters would go yellow on one mine-field site, then the round counter would go red, and vice- versa. you just jad to make a line of 4 or 5 or something.

I swear this is true. Friends also had something weird called "skirrid"

Was it the one with rainbow colours incl. some really lovely indigo pieces?

The one we had which no-one else did: "The Great Game Of Britain"

Also not yet mentioned: "Soccerama" - board game which tried to simulate a Football league season in the 70s (four Divisions, cup competition, Europe, etc.) You rolled dice to determine the outcome of matches, and went up and down leagues snakes and ladders style depending on the result. As I recall, it was really hard to win anything, so got boring v. soon.

Most annoying game (without board) in history: MAD MARBLES

How about "Stratego"? There was a game.

Topple[?] - A big square plastic thing balanced on top of a fallus, and you had to put counters on said thing and not make it fall over

This weird thing that had these sticky rubber strips (yellow and red) that you had to place in sequence to get across the board. I am always reminded of the rubber bits when cutting a Kraft cheese slice in small squares to put in my pasta (me = cook '.' me = student), as that's how the weird rubber strips were stored, on a big pad.

ii. No

iii. No

We had oodles of games as kids, my sister and I, and Mouse Trap was definitely a fave. Can't really remember the names of most, though -- a mountain climbing game with a vertical board, digging out of dungeons, Greek myth games, odd stuff like that. I also got into Yaquinto's stuff at a tender age, though that was more serious stuff, never really had a good person to play opposite with at my age, though.

Weirdest of the bunch, weirdest...hm. Probably the Mork and Mindy card game with the styrofoam eggs.

tvcream indeed!

Relatively short exposures to play of WFF 'N PROOF (as little as three weeks) has been accompanied by 21-point increases in the non- language parts of standard IQ tests.

(btw rickyT, that 'elves = gay' quote in full: "Well, well!" said a voice. "Just look! Bilbo the hobbit on a pony, my dear! Isn't it delicious!")

woo hoo LOGIK

ii. i always thought uno was really strange. i mean it was just last card really, but with a fancy pack. whats the point?

ii. when i was a child: mousetrap. but these days i'd love a copy of risk.

Games friends had and I coveted: nothing unusual, I wanted Hungry Hippos until I got a Spectrum version of it and I wanted Game of Life until I'd played it three times and realised it was actually rubbish.

It was sort of a cross between chess and monopoly, and so fiendishly complicated to play my parents banned it after our first try.

I never coveted anyone else's games, apart from our neighbours who had RISK. I could, after all, turn our entire driveway into a Human Board Game using just one stick of chalk and a pair of dice.

We definitely had Candyland. Loved it.

But if you grew up in Minnesota the BEST game ever to have owned (which we did) was Hüsker Dü. YES it's what the band named themselves after, it means Do You Remember in Danish, it's all about finding matched pairs of images under black draughts pieces, and early 80s MN punks/ indie kids would drill holes in their Hüsker Dü pieces to make Punk Necklaces - I would KILL to find what I did with mine. I suspect my mum threw the game away when all the draughts went missing.

Oddly, a polymath friend of my uncle's invented the Gone Fishin' game. Young me: 'Why?'

We also had Cootie - the 'build an insect' game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, Concentration (like Hüsker Dü, except with cards).

Also I was telling friends a few days back about tormenting my mum with the Speak'n'Spell silent treatment: 'Suzy, do the dishes.' Silent me: 'Y. Y. Y. Y?'

but operation i coveted more than ANY GAME EVAH!! i haf nevah played it to this day

I think I went the other way to you post-surgery, Sarah. By the time I was 10 I was cross-examing paediatricians if they ummed and ahhed EVEN A TINY BIT in the exam room. At home I could be found on the sofa, reading a medical book while Emergency 101 droned on in the background, calling to my dad to bring me another brownie, STAT.

Also, odd Aust board game called Squatter that my parents had. No, you didnt break into flats and try and survive on beans and ramen; it was about sheep and sheep stations and farms and um... stealing sheep, or something.

www.boardgamegeek.com might help you out.

The closest I can find on a search is Pennopoly - but it says that was made in 1991.

Whatever this game is I'm thinkig of (some kind of economics based board game), we were playing it in the early 80s.

Damnit. What was it? It was British, I think. Anyone?

http://www.tragsnart.co.uk/kenshub/kensington/kensington.htm

It was Poleconomy:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/newbggimages/pic8134.jpg

INCREDIBLY confusing game!

I mean, I'd still play it, of course, at least once.

Carsmile's post reminds me - we had Hopalong Ludo! This was like ordinary Ludo except that if you landed on a square occupied by someone else's counter you placed yr counter on top of those and when their turn came you were carried along for the ride. I don't know anyone else who had this game.

The total of games in mark s's category (i) was bolstered by the fact that I liked to design my own board games! One of my efforts was based on the Hanna Barbera cartoon Laff-o-lympics. Another was all about knights in mediaeval times and had such unlikely penalty squares as "Lose sword. Go back three places". Most of the games I designed had a basic pattern of squares like Snakes and Ladders and had penalty and bonus squares like the aforementioned. The squares had various pictures on them, coloured in meticulously with my latest set of Carioca felt-tip pens.

It was brilliant. It always went on for about four hours.

I guess it's not really that rare as I just googled it and found you can buy it online many places (

I guess it's not really that rare but I never knew anybody else who had this game save for a freind of mine who was really into World War history growing up.

This game would take forever. I think 6 hours was the shortest a game ever went and we routinely played through many nights and well into the morning.

(sorry it ate part of my post)

ii. My friend's family had this French road game (the truck one above, perhaps?), and French Pop-up Double Trouble, and that was pretty cool for the US in 1984.

Games I covet: Sherlock Holmes card game my friend Pete has. He also has "Escape from Colditz" the game. Samurai Swords.

I remember having the Careers game in the early 70s. I had a game that had the best-designed play money in the world, but I can't remember if Careers was that game. I kept a few hundred dollars in this play money on my dresser so I could pretend I was rich.

The board was a layout of a city, with hospitals and places to load up on bullets. It was for up to 4 players, you chose to be an agent for either MI6, the CIA, the KGB, or the Gestapo. The aim was to kill your opponents, last player alive the winner. It took 6 wounds to kill, but you could get healed by getting to a hospital.

You moved around the city by throwing 2 dice, or if you thought an opponent was within range, you could use your dice score to try and shoot him. Your dice score was affected by how many wounds you had, so, once you had 3 or 4 wounds, it became almost impossible to get to a hospital in time.

I didn't play Talisman until a few years ago, and it was a bit fun at first but then it went on forever and ever and it quickly got on my nerves.

I recently got Empire Builder, which I think is the same thing as North American Rails, and it's pretty fun. It's a bit "multiplayer solitaire" and once you've got the basic strategy down it seems like it's all in the luck of the draw, but it is fun to draw the lines and watch your network grow. I haven't tried the 18xx train games yet, though. The train game I'm really lusting for is Stephenson's Rocket, by my current favorite game designer, Reiner Knizia.

Anybody remember Survive!?

I quote from the rules, explaining what happens when you land on the square that says "int x;": "Keyword int creates integer variable x ." How many kids are still in the room at this point? Magnificent! It even uses 'goto', to teach the best programming practice to these impressionable youngsters!

this was also highly rated in a similar slashdot story. two weeks later i stumbled on a pc version. never played the actual thing.

actual board game:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/438

computery version:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pelzlpj/londonlaw/

and another that doesn't seem to be finished
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scotland-yard

Some of my friends in my early 20s played Talisman a lot, to the extent of making their own expansion packs for it - so many that they/we rarely played games to completion.

Obscure board games I had:
Thomas The Tank Engine - pick an engine and go around the board picking up carriages along the way until you get to the end of your line. It had a turntable in the middle of the board to pick which line you had to travel down.
Nessie Hunt - a monopoly-style search for the Loch Ness Monster. Most of the board was a map of the loch made of hexagons, and each played paid to get coloured cellophane shapes representing different types of seach equipment that they laid on the board. Every turn the monster popped up somewhere random, and if it was on a square covered by your stuff you won points.

Skiing and snowboarding is a perfect programming analogy. WTF??? How, exactly?

Vul-car will smother you in a fireball of terror!

</geek>

The Ungame
some sort of christian flavored q&a board game. weird. in the royal tennenbaums you can see it on the shelf of games in the closet scene. i yelped when i saw that.

ii.
can't think of any at the moment.

iii.
Mousetrap, for sure. i was envious. perhaps my folks thought it had too many parts or something. it was kind of always in the way in your home once you set it up.

Does anyone remember the Miss Marple game? A friend of mine had some of the remnants from it - one of which was a chocolate with Agatha Christie on it. He can't remember what the game was called, only that it was sort of like Cluedo and you played to win Agatha Christie chocolates.

For about a year after finding this out we referred to all chocolate as Agatha Christie. Sometimes still do.

I met someone a while ago who got very agitated about Hungry Hippos and maintainted that there should be just two hippos, not four, because it would be 'more realistic'. WTF?

Go Fetch It! was my favourite game - it was my friend's not mine sadly. It involved being a dog and hiding plastic bones all over the house while a recording told you what to do. Screwball Scramble also gave me hours of fun, inexplicably. Brit Quiz was truly awful - there were literally no questions a child could answer and it was just ugly and dull.

"Australian sheep farming game. Each player starts with a sheep station, consisting of 5 Natural Pasture paddocks, fully stocked with 3,000 sheep. The player must improve the Station, in order to stock more sheep, first by paying the cost of Improved Pasture, and then Irrigated Pasture. The first player to have 6,000 sheep on a completely irrigated farm is the winner. The money needed to improve the Station, to buy the extra sheep and cover other expenses occured when moving round the board is earned mainly from shrewd buying and selling of sheep, and from the sale of wool from sheep owned by the player at the time he reaches the 'Wool Sale'."

from http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2970/Squatter

I saw this great game in Glasgow... Totopoly! It was all about teaching small children how to gamble.

-- jocelyn (nalra...), November 2nd, 2005.

you are now officially the first person ever in my life who knows what that is (outside my immediate family of course)

I had a Star Trek boardgame which had a brilliant rubber monster and a boring rubber spider that chased you round two planets.

hahahaha, did the ARI put this out?

OMG YES

Favourite childhood game was Ghost Castle - you had to negotiate four rooms that had moving floors, fake doors etc, then climb the tower to win. But landing on certain squares would trigger a skull to be rolled down the staircase and if it knocked you over you died. Or something. It was a damn site more entertaining than I Want To Bite Your Finger.

I keep finding Kensington in the LP racks of charity shops - is it worth the investment?

the only weird boardgame i owned was manhunt: the electric computer detective game.

"Clearance Sale". You don't say.

I don't remember this game being fun to play, but the board had big interlocking gears on it that were fun to move around. My family had this when I was young, and decades later I found one at a rummage sale for a buck or two and bought it to hang on the wall. (Though I haven't done that yet.)

! I must look this up.

ihttp://www.timewarptoys.com/cootie4.jpg

4. Masterpiece. Not rare, but man what a waste of time. You bid on all these famous paintings and tacked on the back were the $$ values(or "FORGERY"). Because it was entirely a guessing game, you ending up just bidding your entire fortune on Mona Lisa or some shit because you "felt lucky".

3. Some Scooby-Doo Game. I don't remember much about this, except it was 3-D, made from cardboard, and had this really cool part where a weird dial sucked your character beneath the ground only to pop her back up somewhere else on the board.

2. Don't Touch the Spider. Similar to Operation, except you had to scoop up plastic insects from an electrified web and if you touched it a foam spider flew into your face.

1. Roll 'Em. In this game, you rolled dice and moved that many spaces. THAT'S IT. We have a winner?

We played this tonight after dinner -- a vintage 1971 Monopoly-derived game looking ahead to the '72 election.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HMpL4hLTudY/TzyQIhXZYTI/AAAAAAAADK4/yZyJBBi95wk/s1600/whocanbeatnixon.jpg

I was Nixon, and I LOST! Just like Inglourious Basterds, with better dialogue.

http://samuel-warde.com/2012/08/who-can-beat-nixon-board-game/

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10632/who-can-beat-nixon