Buried Gems of the Ameritrash Rehabilitation Movement

I'm all for the classic German family style games. Until you try to lump in The Adventurers, a family-friendly AT gem that none other than Steve "Tanktop" Avery used to champion here, with them. That's going too far. So let's start talking about the forgotten, missed, or otherwise underrated AT games. Games that may have been on clearance several years ago, but are now getting harder or expensive to find. Or just stuff that everyone thought you were crazy for liking and now you feel its time has come.

Let's reverse the polarity here and keep F:AT from imploding.

Come on, folks!

Well, The Adventurers is one that I think people should at least try.

Dice Town is one I dropped in the ERP thread, but I think is more fitting in the ARM. You roll poker dice and it has a fun western theme.

Chaos Marauders is another one that hit the discount bin that is just a good fun cardgame with a lot of flavor. Yeah it is random but good for some laughs.

Monsters Menace America is a great game that only has a problem in the end game dice fest but that's only a concern for people who are more concerned about winning than the experience.

In advance of the ERP/ARM Summit Talks, I'm glad to see this thread. There is a lot of healing we can do together.

Yeah, Chaos Marauders...that's a fun, silly game...It's Stephen Hand (Fury of Dracula), but apparently it was "kind of" plagiarized from an obscure canoe game called Ogallalla or something like that.

I've never seen the FFG edition.

I think Lineage II is THE buried gem here...it's a mad cross between Talisman, Cosmic Encounter, a DoaM...so glad I've got one, you'll never see it again.

The Ares Project is pretty good and not really talked about.

Battleball isn't exactly unheard of, but I think it's very good and an excellent buy.

Duel in the Dark is fantastic. Really unique.

Grind isn't bad and can be had for pretty cheap.

We talked about Hour of Glory in the other thread, it's a pretty solid game.

JAB is underrated. Great realtime card game.

Lunch Money is a stupid card game that's very humorous. You can combine it with Beer Money as well.

Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan is great. One of my favorite hidden movement games.

Room 25 is short, light fun that often devolves into shoving a person into a room full of fiery death.

And I second The Ares Project.

A couple games that I own that I've yet to try but look like they'd fit the bill are Wrasslin' and Block Mania.

What I like most about Chaos Marauders is the references to Malal the largely unknown 5th Chaos God which basically never came to be because of IP legalities.

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."


Room 25 - That's a newer'ish game right? Reading the description reminded me of the movie The Cube. That one looked pretty fun.


I've gotta say, hidden/overlooked/underappreciated AT games are harder to come by I think. Especially since I've mentioned a few in the ERP thread that would be more at home here like Cube Quest.

Family Business is a wonderful and brutal card-game. One of my relatives is one of the cards so that alone makes it perma-shelf for me. It really is a cut-throat game of making and breaking alliances quickly and doing whatever you can to keep your mobsters alive. I really need to pull that one out again sooner rather than later.

Junta: Viva El Presidente does not get nearly enough talk as it should.

It is criminal that Plague and Pestilence has never seen a reprint considering it's just cards. I had a deal with one of my buddies who was going to make me some custom artwork to decorate a box to hold the cards...Well in true artist style he got 90% done on the cover, but could never finish the last 10%. So he gave me the original which was a Pied-Piper Skeleton leading out a swarm of rats from a city in the same art style as the original. Really awesome piece. And I of course decided to put it in something to keep it safe, and what that something was/is eludes me.

ScrumBrawl! Fantasy themed sports game, 2-4 players, multiple balls with random effects in play, multiple moving goals, attacking, throwing, killing, events, fumbles, and a whole lot more. Plays in about an hour and the rules are plenty straightforward.

No team building, no minis, just a bunch of cardboard, cards, carnage, and fun.

The original GW Chaos Marauders is among my favorite games. Haven't played the FFG version.

wadenels wrote: The original GW Chaos Marauders is among my favorite games. Haven't played the FFG version.

I'm not 100% sure but I think there weren't any significant changes. I love that old style GW art though and would consider the older version an upgrade over my FFG version.

Best game component name also: The Cube of Devastation!

If the basic mechanics of Risk are your thing, then Risk: Godstorm is seriously fun. It's the one game that I'm happiest I bought despite the reviews. I wonder if it got panned because people wanted Risk Refined. Godstorm ain't that. But it's damn fun.

VonTush wrote: I've gotta say, hidden/overlooked/underappreciated AT games are harder to come by I think. Especially since I've mentioned a few in the ERP thread that would be more at home here like Cube Quest.

Depends on what is meant by hidden/overlooked/underappreciated. Long before many FAT:ties perceived boardgames beyond the standard family fare, there were all kinds of odd boardgames published. A few years ago, I did a full-fledged review of an obscure but innovative bughunt-style game called Last Frontier: the Vesuvius Incident, and it ended up getting a fancy new edition published through Kickstarter a year ago. I've got a bunch of other games like that, true-blue Ameritrash with rich themes and mechanics that didn't get run through the Euro-copier machine of the last 20 years. But these games are often difficult to obtain now, having been out of print since the '80s or '90s.

Just for a random example, take Asteroid. Published by GDW around 1980 or so, Asteroid was soon lost to obscurity for nearly sharing an identical name with an extremely popular arcade game that came out just months earlier. Actually, a second edition was published in 1983, and a third edition was published in Japan in 1985, so apparently Asteroids did okay back in the day.

Asteroid was actually one of the best boardgame implementations of a classic D&D dungeon crawl, though themed instead for a near-future space setting featuring heroic astronauts and murderous robots. One player sets up the asteroid station (dungeon), with hidden robots, computer terminals, collapsed passages, some loot, and the nefarious computer "brain" that controls the robots. The other players control a motley crew of heroes who are trying to sabotage the computer brain and divert the course of the asteroid station before it crashes into Earth, potentially killing millions of innocent people.

The game balance favors the heroes in Asteroid, but can be re-balanced by adding in some evil clone soldiers from the variant scenario. The components were very nice by 1980 standards, but modern gamers would be disappointed at using cardboard chits instead of miniatures that can painted. Aside from some complexity involving demolition charges and also Sasha the Wonder Dog, the rules are solid and easy to learn, allowing for shootouts, melee, computer hacking, and blowing things up. However, the setup time is at least 20 minutes even for experienced players, and depending on the degree of hidden movement allowed for the bad guys, play length can clock in around 3 hours. That never bothered old school AT gamers, but modern folks like to wrap things up within 2 hours so they can rush into a different game. Attention spans have been dropping for many years now, and the Euro games name-checked in the ERP thread played a part in that decline.

EDIT: I have probably been thinking about Asteroid lately because of an oddball comment in the movie thread where Barnes compared Barney to Old B.O.B. from the Black Hole movie. At least two of the three types of robots in Asteroid seem to be directly based on the robots from the Black Hole. The other one copied is the ominous Maximillian bot, with five of them in Asteroid.

Trade Winds. (Parker Brothers, 1960)

Proto-hobby game pirate game. Using a hand of crew cards you saila round the board attacking other ships, raiding their harbour or heading to Treasure Island (in all it's vacuform splendor) to plunder its booty. No dice rolling for movement or combat as you crew cards do all the heavy lifting.

Fun, furious and plays under an hour with two.

Nostra City (Hazgaard Games)

You play as a made man in the mob and your goal is to sway the jury to let the Godfather walk away from his list of "alleged" crimes.

You will try to build up your Turfs by cashing in on yours and other players rackets (drugs, prostitution and gambling) You're all on the same side after all. During cash out if you choose not to pay another player, they can then draw Vendetta cards. Vendetta cards provide players a means to f with other players or secretly turn them into a snitch for the FBI.

At the end of the game cash secretly given to the jury is revealed, if there are more innocent symbols revealed the Godfather is innocent and the person with the most vps wins. If the verdict it guilty all players lose, unless they are a snitch, in the event two players are snitches the one with the most vps wins.

Total Rumble(Gen X Games)
Hot potato styled wrestling card game. I reviewed it a couple of years ago with low marks but since then it has become a game night favourite. Chairs, tables, ladders and KOs.

I eventually made a life-sized strap to present to the Champion. Fun fun fun.

Yeah, there are the Dwarf Star games, Ares Mag games...etc. And I think those deserve a mention. Citadel of Blood looks pretty awesome and one I should figure out how to play. An Ares mag game which is a dungeon crawl and the dungeon is formed on 5/8" chits. So not having a dungeon where each hero/enemy is mapped out in an exact location is interesting.

Asteroid sounds pretty fun. How does it compare to Starship Troopers from AH? There's the obvious scale difference, but mapping/hidden elements sounds similar. I traded the copy I had off because it's been ages since I've played a 2-player game.

The attention span thing is an interesting topic though. My gut agrees to an extent. But then I start wondering if shorter games were just filling a hole in the market. In other words are people's attention spans getting shorter or are people with already short attention spans coming into the hobby?

wadenels wrote: If the basic mechanics of Risk are your thing, then Risk: Godstorm is seriously fun. It's the one game that I'm happiest I bought despite the reviews. I wonder if it got panned because people wanted Risk Refined. Godstorm ain't that. But it's damn fun.

Aside from setting, is there much difference between Godstorm and 2210?

Stonecutter wrote:

wadenels wrote: If the basic mechanics of Risk are your thing, then Risk: Godstorm is seriously fun. It's the one game that I'm happiest I bought despite the reviews. I wonder if it got panned because people wanted Risk Refined. Godstorm ain't that. But it's damn fun.

Aside from setting, is there much difference between Godstorm and 2210?

Leaders are different. Godstorm has the Underworld instead of the Moon. When your troops die they go to the Underworld (which is like a mini Risk map) but you can resurrect them by controlling key points like Altars and Crypts. The Gods (leaders) have abilities that affect the main board as well as the Underworld. The Gods can also get into their own Godswar battle when they meet. Gods, however, aren't units and don't participate in normal battle.

The God Cards can be completely nuts and make the game swing wildly. There's one that sinks an entire continent, killing every troop on it and removing it from the game.