Buried Gems of the Ameritrash Rehabilitation Movement

There's that game that Barnes (not BizarroBarnes) championed a few years ago, I have never seen it but was intrigued by the idea Train Raider.

What about Micro Mutants? Haven't played but seems AT to me...

I was going to add Micro Mutants, it's fun and very trashy.

superflycircus.com/2011/04/micro-mutants...icking-and-flicking/

I just thought everyone had played it so it wasn't a "hidden gem"

Micro Mutants seems to be grossly underappreciated. It's awesome, though it's usually necessary to place a thin towel under the velvet green mat to get the best wink-flipping.

I'm going to add the Age of Steam: Zombie Apocalypse expansion, just because I can.

I think Arena Maximus is a lot of fun (an early Kevin Wilson design), but we only play one-lap races. It wears out its welcome rather quickly.

I'm also one of the few people alive who enjoys Battle Beyond Space, apparently.

I doubt that Dungeon Raiders counts as AT, but it's a fun cheap card game. I think it's WAY better than Boss Monster.

Leaping Lemmings is pretty cool, and doesn't get as much press as it should.

And of course there's the old school Mad Magazine Game, which is just plain random.

Middle-Earth Quest has a lot of haters, but it's probably my most-played game from 2009. And we still play it.

We play Nightmare once per year, and I laugh myself silly every time. It helps that, inexplicably, I still own a VCR.

Perikles (Martin Wallace) is quite good, and has a ton of die rolling.

Powerboats is a very good racing game with a neat die-locking mechanic. And it lets you jump over an entire island with ramp.

Is Quackshot worth mentioning? It's amazing.

Ring-o Flamingo until I die.

Lest you forget, Shadowlords! still has an enemy called Invincible Darkness. That should be enough to convince you to own a copy.

Unspeakable Words is a word game with dice and Cthulhu mythos.

We Didn't Playtest This At All is still 5 minutes long and pretty fantastic. It also has some of the best flavor text in the business.

SuperflyTNT wrote: I was going to add Micro Mutants, it's fun and very trashy.

superflycircus.com/2011/04/micro-mutants...icking-and-flicking/

I just thought everyone had played it so it wasn't a "hidden gem"

I haven't and couldn't buy it when FFG was flipping it for like 10 bucks at Xmas, cos I'm in Europe and shipping kills it. now it's OOP, no?

I dunno. FFG has featured Micro Mutants in their last 5 winter blow-outs. Maybe there's still a warehouse overflowing with MM somewhere in Utah.

Well you can't get it where I am.

Quackshot rules!

Train Raider is really great...I think at one point Zev had his mitts on it but I don't know what happened there, that was years ago. It needs just a touch of development to smooth over some rough edges, but it's so bad ass. It really is a PU&D rail game, but then there are battle missions where you go shoot at other trains. And it has THE GREATEST RULE OF ALL TIME...if you're behind, you can literally stake the entire game on completing a mission. If you pull it off, you get a massive bonus and could win from being dead last. If you fail, the rail company you represent is left in shambles and shamed out of business. You're eliminated.

I actually just bought Micro _Monsters_ for the kids...it's a streamlined/simpler version of Micro Mutants designed for younger children. Just cost a cool $10. I was thinking about getting the full MM, but they're still too little to fool with much in the way of special powers, etc.

It's just shameful that Battle Beyond Space never got much traction.

Guerilla is horribly, horribly underrated...it kind of fell victim to the Greenwood Curse so the rules are ATROCIOUS but there's a good game in there with some really cool ideas.

Did people hate Middle-Earth Quest? I thought it sounded cool, and remember reading some positive stuff about it, so I grabbed a copy, but haven't managed to play it yet. The endgame fight with the Nazgul always seemed a bit iffy from reading the rules, but I can live with that.

Michael Barnes wrote: I actually just bought Micro _Monsters_ for the kids...it's a streamlined/simpler version of Micro Mutants designed for younger children. Just cost a cool $10. I was thinking about getting the full MM, but they're still too little to fool with much in the way of special powers, etc.

I had the full Micro Mutants and we never used all the special stuff anyway. It kind of detracts from the core of the game. We had a lot of fun with but eventually sold Micro Mutants; I've been eyeing Micro Monsters.

Battle Beyond Space is great. Leaping Lemmings is too, but I don't know that I'd call LL AT.

VonTush wrote: Funny you mention that the mechanics were lifted...Considering (from Wikipedia):
"Moorcock's conception of Chaos also heavily inspired, and in some cases was lifted verbatim by Games Workshop in the creation of its Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 fictional settings. Notably, however, they only briefly used Moorcock's conceptions of Order or the Balance. The descriptions of Chaos, of the eight-pointed star, of the Chaos Lords, the strange multicolored hues of energies, mutations and warping of matter and flesh, and so forth found in the Warhammer settings are all derived directly from Moorcock's works."

A lot of the Warhammer mythos is derived from Moorcock. For example, Ulthuan and the High/Dark Elves are literally lifted straight from Elric's Melniboné.

Colorcrayons wrote: and has an actual D&D theme instead of MB & GW's contrived attempt at ripping D&D off.

Right, as opposed to D&D ripping off every source of mythology and fantasy ever.

Warhammer came about because Rick Priestley et. al. wanted to fight big battles with all of their D&D minis. That is all.

Michael Barnes wrote: ...it has THE GREATEST RULE OF ALL TIME...if you're behind, you can literally stake the entire game on completing a mission. If you pull it off, you get a massive bonus and could win from being dead last. If you fail, the rail company you represent is left in shambles and shamed out of business. You're eliminated.

Escape from Colditz has this as the "Do or Die" cards, which is a mechanic every game should have.

If you haven't played Escape from Colditz do yourself a favor and find a copy to play ASAP. A Classic game that has stood the test of time.

LA

I've found the stead rewriting of Warhammer over the years rather entertaining. Remember that Games workshop started out as the UK distributor for DnD. GW had been around about a decade before their own in house minis games started to take off.

If you read 1st ed WFRP or early rule books etc, the influence of DnD is really obvious. Moorcock is listed in AD&D appendix N as an influence of Gygax but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a direct source for Priestly et al as well.

The Gothic Game is definitely one that needs to get a nod here...even though it's painfully scarce and I can count the number of copies I've physically seen in my life on...my ears.

It's total roll-and-move and VERY old fashioned...some have compared it to Talisman, but that's not really right at all. You roll and move your way into various rooms in the gothic castle and draw cards that are themed around the room. So you might be in the ballroom when a chandelier falls on you and kills you instantly, eliminating you from the game. Capricious to the extreme, it's the kind of game where cards and board position line up to create once-in-a-lifetime events that are usually hilarious. This tends to happen at least once a game.

It's a pure elimination game. The idea is that you want to find weapons and then use them to off the other players...who may or may not have the one counter card corresponding to the weapon you're using.

There are some NASTY rules. The "power of adjacency" means that if you are next to another player's pawn, you get to choose where they move. Such as, into the endless staircase or next to the vampire. The vampire is a large pawn that rests in a crypt. The first player that goes there gets this pawn put over their regular one and they get several turns to run around and kill other players. Of course there's a wooden stake that kills the vampire player.

There's also the ability to dump poo from up on a tower down onto a player, which makes them smelly and other players can't go into the room with them. I have never played this game and not had the whole table just rolling by the end of it.

Confession time. Back around 2007, I actually got in contact with the designer because I had some ideas to get the game back in print. I sent him some files with some "modern" rules which I think would have made the game marketable, but I was also adamant that the game be completely, 100% playable in its original form with all of the original rules. I had new cards, just a couple of new rules (mostly to shush crybabies), and a concept for new artwork that would have totally kept the orignal's tone and amazing logo. He loved it, and was actually on board. So I got to talking with Dollar Bill (the "good" AGF partner) and another friend of mine to start talking about doing the paperwork, financing a reprint, getting it published and so forth and it just kind of fell through because Dollar Bill (who was going to bankroll the whole thing) lost interest as young, wealthy people tend to do so it just stalled out and went nowhere.

Wait, I take that back. I did actually play one time with a table of people who just didn't get the game at all. It was the same night I played Thurn und Taxis for my first and only time.

It was a group of six, all hardcore BGG types. Customers of mine, when I was doing the home delivery thing. These were the kind of people that carried around little notebooks to write down the names of games they want to play and check them off when they do. 35-50 year old, middle aged porkers. A couple of tubby gamer-wives that never got the memo that ladies shouldn't bellow or snort. Table full of total stereotypes.

Anyway, I brought the game because Steve Avery wanted to play it but he wound up not showing up so it was me and the Puerto Rico fan club. About four turns in, I could see brows furrowing. And they all sort of adopted that weird, condescending manner- "do you really like this game?" "I'm not seeing where there are any decisions here." "I would use the term 'game' loosely to describe this"...and of course..."we ought to just roll dice and knock whoever rolls the lowest out". They made me feel like such a kid, bringing a game to the table that wasn't proper. But I made the most of it and just had fun, cracking jokes and trying to make them feel as awkward as they were making me feel.

But that was the one time that The Gothic Game tanked.

BGG marketplace- $300. Jesus.

The Gothic Game looks easy enough to PnP if the designer was interested in releasing the files (assuming he still has them). I've wanted a copy for a long time but haven't tried in earnest to get one.