Buried Gems of the Ameritrash Rehabilitation Movement

Gary Sax wrote: I'd submit Conquest of Paradise here. It's a nice, short, compact Civ game. War is rewarded because it isn't very deadly---so you can try risky things that may not work because dudes only die on a 6 roll. It also has the fun hidden islands mechanic as well.

No one really played it because it is in truth a DOAM/AT game, I think, but it was published by GMT in a historical pacific islanders setting.

A fun underrated game that is supposed to be getting a reprint with a mounted map and that expansion event deck already included. I plan on picking it up once it hits.

I think it's fun, but I look at Conquest of Paradise as more of a 4X. For me, it felt like it was too short - like Warrior Knights, about the time it really gets rolling, it ends. It can kill you like Eclipse does too, where all of the hexes that you explore can be duds. I'd still play it any time, though, and I should drag it out for the coworker gamers group that I play with.

Also, Runewars gets some love, but to my mind it is one of the better FFG games. The action card engine running the game is brilliant, though the hero stuff is a bit unintuitive and wars aren't as important as you might think they are in the base game.

Shapeshifters was published by Fat Messiah Games in the early '90s. The game is about dueling wizards who are capable of shape-shifting into a wide variety of animals and even some mythological creatures. The wizards can also cast some magic spells. The game is played on a color hex map displaying some variety in terrain, including a small lake and a river. Each wizard has a reserve of magical energy that can be spent or saved from round to round, in order to cast spells or change shape. Extreme changes in size or shape cost more magical energy, and spells can only be cast in humanoid forms. Small creatures are less expensive to maintain, faster, and able to hide. Large creatures are stronger and tougher and usually capable of serious damage, though slower and unable to hide. Sometimes it's convenient to shift into a aquatic creature or a flying creature to avoid a foe and save up energy for a larger shape. The game includes a complex chart that shows all the possible forms, and the costs to move from one shape on the chart to another.

Shapeshifters is a fun two-player game, and I tend to forget that I own it because I rarely have the opportunity to play two-player games. One time, a group of us played a big multi-player scenario that I made up, called Survival of the Fittest. Each time you delivered the killing blow to an opponent, you moved up to the next level of power on the wizard chart, though that is normally a fixed level determined at the start of a game. Despite having eight players that one time, it played reasonably quick, in under two hours. A normal two-player game probably lasts about 45 minutes, and could probably get down to closer to 30 minutes with two experienced players.

The only serious shortcoming of the game is the components. Players are required to write down their form selections each turn and then simultaneously reveal, but I found it better to make copies of the shapeshifting chart so everybody could just move a chit to indicate current selection on their chart. The map is works well for the game, but isn't visually interesting. Wizards are represented by cardboard chits. Might have been better to give both players a deck of small cards representing their form selections. Repeat play between familiar opponents can get a bit repetitive, as players tend to gravitate towards certain favorite forms.

Diceland by Cheapass Games is awesomely fun. Big cardboard 8-sided dice represent characters (or spaceships) and each side of the die gives you different powers. You throw the dice on the table and try to hit other dice and then attack them if your die is pointed at them.

Guys riding into battle on dinosaurs ??!! You gotta be fucking kidding! A true lost classic.

*Plus, you get a lavaball-spewing volcano to boot!

Mad Dog wrote: How difficult would a DIY copy of Thunder Road be to make?

Not hard, if you don't mind paper/cardboard everything. The files are already on BGG, or I can get them to you if you don't know what you need.

Unfortunately it won't look as cool or have little minis like the real game, which is why I haven't gone through the trouble.

RobertB wrote: I think it's fun, but I look at Conquest of Paradise as more of a 4X. For me, it felt like it was too short - like Warrior Knights, about the time it really gets rolling, it ends. It can kill you like Eclipse does too, where all of the hexes that you explore can be duds. I'd still play it any time, though, and I should drag it out for the coworker gamers group that I play with.

The expansion for FFG's Warrior Knights extends the end game; highly recommended.

Conquest of Paradise is definitely a 4X game, but if it isn't AT then it's a close cousin. The rules are tight and concise, you can explain the game in 5-10 minutes, and from there it's really open-ended. If it had minis instead of chits and was set in a fantasy or sci-fi world it would definitely be in the discussion. As it is it's a GMT production with historical flavor and is often overlooked.

Today I dropped a nice chunk of change on Mage Knight Dungeons, a title I haven't owned or played in at least 10 years. We'll see if it holds up; even with everything that's come out since then, I fondly recall it as the best pure dungeon crawler I've ever played. I hold it in higher esteem than the D&DAS games, and I enjoy those a great deal. Those little chests were so damn cool.

Oh, and it's an amalgamation of disparate Ameritrashy genres. It's a game very much of its time, something that seemingly could have only come out of 2002. The game is a weird synthesis of its own past, present and future: thematically rooted squarely in 1980s dungeon crawlers, sold in the 90s set-and booster model yet occupying an awkward transitional space in WizKids' history between the slow decline of Mage Knight and the rise of HeroClix. It's not a struggle to see why it failed: mainline MK players didn't want to play a grid-based, throwback dungeon crawler; board gamers didn't understand it wasn't a miniatures game. And never mind that it was only kind of a collectable game; for many folks in 2002, the late 90s/early-aughts CCG glut was still fresh enough to cast considerable baggage on anything that even vestigially recalled that kind of sales model.

It felt like a weird product, even back then, even for someone who really enjoyed it. The first time I played it, way back in 2002, we talked about two things at the table: 1) how fucking awesome it was and 2) how we couldn't figure out who was supposed to be the audience for this game. Yet, despite its hybridized/bastardized pedigree, the game itself doesn't have an identity crisis: it's a goddamn dungeon crawler, and it knows it. There's nothing confused or awkward about it. In fact, it's lean, mean, pure, highly customizable and boatloads of fun. And if it's even half as good as I remember it, I'll probably never touch the DDAS games again.

Truly a gem. Carry on.

scissors wrote:

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Guys riding into battle on dinosaurs ??!! You gotta be fucking kidding! A true lost classic.

*Plus, you get a lavaball-spewing volcano to boot!

This one is my personal grail game. This is the only game that I've been looking for that I can't even catch a sniff of.