Totally Obscure Game of the Day

[Particle_Man]

Stomp! One player plays the two feat of the giant. The other player plays the 15 or so gnomes/elves/whatever.

Knights of Camelot (by TSR) - a board game that had enough random tables that it was suprisingly close to a D&D game without a DM (except that players took turns one at a time and were in competition with each other). there was a viking mini-game that was similar in style, though with less minurature tables.

Also have love for Talisman (2nd ed.) and Wiz-War (Note that one kid I know basically buckled down and learned to read just so that he could PLAY Wiz-War!). And Lost Worlds (I once played a Skeleton and brought a Cold Drake down to 1 body point and then it fled -- I had not a scratch!).

Cosmic Encounter (version before the most recent one). Kinda cool board game where each Alien race has a schtick that breaks the rules.

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

Awful Green Things from Outer Space?

Dangit!

Why didn't Tom Wham games break big?

Why indeed. I love pretty well any of the Tom Wham games that were published in Dragon Magazine back in the good old days.

My personal favourite remains File 13, though I like Elefant Hunt and Search for the Emperors Treasure too! I really should dig them out & inflict them on my kids!

 

[WayneLigon]

Credo - Card game where each player represents a faction at the Council of Nicene and tries to get chunks of his own philosophy woven into the document that defines Christianity. You play cards and events to gather enough votes and periodically you vote on a section. Once all sections are done, (I think) the winner is the person who manages to influence the document the most.

Source of the Nile - An absolutely fascinating game that changed every time you played it. The map was a big and mostly blank vinyl map of Africa; as your expedition entered you rolled for terrain types and then marked that on the map with a crayon (?). Your goal is to find the source of the Nile River without starving to death, having your bearers turn on you, dying in any number of horrific ways, etc. The Dragon had a series of excellent expansion articles for it, where you could find lost cities and such.

Imperium - The board game that depicted the Vilani/Solomani conflict in Traveller, though it was not officially labeled that. Mankind finally breaks free of Earth and begins to establish colonies.. only the discover someone else has beaten them to it. One cool thing was that the Imperium player had overwhelming forces but had to justify the expenditures to the Emperor. Use too many resources with too little to show for it, and you got recalled back to the throneworld and the Terran player won. (Or something like that).

Yes, Tom Wham games were quite fun. Snit Smashing! We played this in school and everyone loved it (you have to imagine the effect on a bunch of high schoolers upon reading out loud 'your goal is to stick your snotch in the snadergrab').

Divine Right always looked like a lot of fun. I wish I'd gotten to play it.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Wiz-War is a good one...

Best. Game. EVAR. Loads of fun.

Others (some obscure, some not): Lots of Avalon Hill, my favorites being MBT, Tobruk, and Air Force. Nuclear War & Nuclear Escalation card games. The Ace of Aces books were great. A ship-to-ship naval battle card game whose title I forget was another one we played a lot.

A fun game that didn't fit the traditional mold was Grand Prix. I think it was AH but I'm not certain. You wouldn't think a board game simulating '50s and '60s Grand Prix racing could hold much fascination, but it was quite well done, and we ran a number of "campaigns".

 

[jmucchiello]

Anyone else have a copy of 4th Dimension? A TSR 2-player abstract strategy game. It combines elements of Chess and Stratego (came out before Stratego I think). So old it has the little wizard with a wand TSR logo on the box.

 

[WayneLigon]

Anyone else have a copy of 4th Dimension? A TSR 2-player abstract strategy game. It combines elements of Chess and Stratego (came out before Stratego I think). So old it has the little wizard with a wand TSR logo on the box.

I used to own it. I think it got thrown out in the move.

 

[GMSkarka]

Good lord. Some of the games people are listing as "obscure"....Marvel Superheroes? Toon? TMNT?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Supremacy - By Supremacy games. A RISK style game with stuff like WMD's, stock market effects, and other resource allocation aspects. Never got to play it that much though.

 

[Particle_Man]

There was a board game put out by TSR kinda like checkers, except the pieces were dice and the face up determined their movement (exactly) and capturing pieces meant the "dots" had to be distributed among the other dice, and since you needed to have 25 dots in play, you lost when you had only 4 dice left. I can't remember the name, though.

 

[Chaldfont]

Supremacy - By Supremacy games. A RISK style game with stuff like WMD's, stock market effects, and other resource allocation aspects. Never got to play it that much though.

I've been trying to get a game of this together for a while. I played this a lot back in high school.

Of course, it always degenerated into a nuke-fest. We could not resist those plastic mushroom cloud pieces!