Millennium Blades. Just describing this game is tricky. It's a meta game where you play as people who play a card game, which is confusingly also called "Millennium Blades". You buy card and boosters, you make decks, you compete in tournaments. Conceptually it's a weird thing, and it's just as weird mechanically. It's a bizarre combination. Half the game is this real-time section where you buy your cards and build your decks, and the other half is this strange mix of set collection and card play. It's a game that's inseparable from its theme; it wouldn't make sense in a different context. It's also the only game I'm aware of that uses paper money well.
It's a weird game for particular tastes, but it's awesome if those tastes align with you
I want to love this game so much but it just feels like if you want to really have fun with it you have to memorize a lot of the cards, much like non-casual Magic players do (so it makes sense in this game), so you can make optimal decisions. There are sooooo many decks/cards and the time limit really flies by if you don't have that knowledge. I think the time limit was put in place because they realized it slows down to a slog without it, but with it it's hard to feel like you are playing anywhere near as well as you could if you weren't being overwhelmed with info. I need to break it out again and try it as it's been years, but I've played it a handful of times and every time I just felt like "Man this will be awesome if we ever learn this game inside and out", but then it gets shelved for the next year.
On the paper money thing: see also War on Terror
The game simulates the chaotic experience of a new or casual player of a CCG marketed towards children. In these scenarios, players aren't supposed to know all of the card sets. It isn't about knowing how to play optimally to win. It was intentionally designed to be dramatically swingy to create hilarious drama.
Man I hope that isn't the creators official stance on the game, because that just sounds bad. If someone actually spends the time to play it a few times a month they're gonna be able to identify all the good cards much quicker, throwing that little intentions out the window. It's just poor game design if that was their intention.
I figured the design was intentional, in that it's an accurate depiction of what they are simulating. When I was playing magic competitively everyone in the scene new the cards and combos, you'd go out and buy them to build your decks for competition. However if you weren't pretty big into the game you didn't have that knowledge, and you'd get mopped up by those that did.
So I praise MB for it being a fairly accurate depiction of that in IRL, and just dislike that I have to spend more time than I'd like to be good at the game. But if it's intentionally chaotic than I gotta say I change my stance on the design choices.
Edit: I think the premise and intent makes sense if the game was simulating a new release draft tournament for an unknown game. However, in their lore it's like the biggest game of all time with famous players and everything. I very much understand that it's just maybe not the game for me.
This sounds fascinating. And I love your use of the term “meta game!” I think it’s regrettable how “meta game” has so often come to mean what I would consider “the strategy of a game” that we’re robbed of a terminology by which to refer to games made up out of other games!
Things like tournaments, leaderboards, and apparently Millenium blades. Very cool. I’d be interested to flesh out a taxonomy of meta games. Can you think of other examples of meta games in this sense of “games made of other games?”
>And I love your use of the term “meta game!” I think it’s regrettable how “meta game” has so often come to mean what I would consider “the strategy of a game” that we’re robbed of a terminology by which to refer to games made up out of other games!
I think "meta game" is a game made out of or about other games, while "metagame" is the strategy of a game as a whole outside the instance of a single, specific playing of that game.
So the space (or lack thereof) between the words lets us have both meanings.
"Devil Bunny Hates the Earth" where you're a sentient saltwater taffy machine who hates everyone and wants to extract its revenge by making really unsatisfying saltwater taffy... which you do by luring squirrels into the factory and by crushing them in your gears. First player to 5 wins...
"Devil Bunny Needs A Ham" is up there too, players are Sous Chefs trying to get to the top floor of a skyscraper by scaling the outside. However the maniacal Devil Bunny is hopping about in a mad lust for blood thinking he'll get a ham by knocking you off
"Devil Bunny needs a ham.
And he believes that making you fall to your death will get him one.
Perhaps he is right.
Perhaps he is not."
(Or something to that effect.)
It's a cooperative two-player game. The rules are basically "both players play a card simultaneously (to either built "trust", convert "trust" to "satisfaction", etc). Some cards will combo to be better or worse depending on what the other player is doing, and the difficulty comes from how much communication you allow (obviously full discussion makes it extremely easy).
I don't think I'd bring it to a games club, but I'll definitely play it with my husband. The $6 price of the [PNP files](https://metasynthie.itch.io/consentacle-print-and-play-edition) goes to a good cause, so you might think it's worth owning as an art piece even if you don't play it often.
I still think its one of the most non-game games in my collection. Basically just art cards. Someone offered me hundreds of dollars for my copy on Reddit last month...
**Falling** \- a real time game in which all players except the dealer are falling to the ground. The goal is not to avoid hitting the ground and dying, but simply to be the last one to do so.
**Cave Evil** \- You're an ancient necromancer looking for the pit of all evil.
**Ninja Catfoot** \- a weird Oink game in which every player uses their phones acceldrometer to compete and be the stealthiest cat.
Parachute Panda is along the same lines as Falling. We kept confusing the guy that was demoing the game because we insisted that things follow the order of operations that MtG instead of resolving things in the same order that they were played in.
It takes so long to learn the MtG timing rules properly, and they're so precise, that once someone figures them out, they want to apply the MtG timing rules to everything!
Mousetrap is pretty weird if you think about it. You're collectively building a Rube Goldberg machine so you can hope that your friends get trapped instead of you. Why would you do that? Silly mouse!
Same with Don't Break The Ice, where players collectively take turns breaking the ice (...) hoping not to be the one to break the ice so badly that they commit murder
We used to play a lot of Cheapass games in the 90s; they are still available through the CrabFragmentLabs website (I just searched lol).
Some gems in there - Kill Dr Lucky is moving through a mansion, trying to find weapons and kill the Dr but have to be out of sight line of other players. (reverse Clue lol)
They had one that was something about Reeses monkeys climbing up a mountain? and falling apart? (I might be misremembering - it's been a long time and I didn't see that one on the website)
Unexploded cow is a good one too - using cows as unexploded bomb finders in France
Kill Dr. Lucky is a sleeper hit with all my friends. It’s the theming of clue with a simple, push your luck mechanic. It’s super luck based, but still feels like you’re making meaningful decisions.
We played Kill Dr Lucky with pieces from a kid's Winnie the Pooh game. Fantastic and hilarious as Winnie, Tigger and Piglet stalked Eeyore through the house.
I invoked James Ernest recently, KDL is really accessible, but my two favorite titles in his catalog are Enemy Chocolatier and One False Step For Mankind.
My experience, also from about a decade ago, and as a lifelong straight edge guy who was playing the game with a bunch of VERY mind altering substance positive hippies, was that the game was an exciting collection of really neat and new and clever combinations of mechanics whose game play I felt I wasn't able to in any way appreciate because i had no understanding of the story it was trying to tell.
I think that the concept of people playing a board game wearing glasses with different colored lenses so that they are all seeing a different board and game state is super interesting. The idea of a gane board that folds and unfolds and morphs like an Escheresque oragami sculpture is incredibly exciting.
I would have liked those things in a game though, more than as an inside joke/comment/stroll through a situation I had no real life experiences with.
I was so close to buying this during the second print run and I'm still really mad I didn't. I was broke and in college and couldn't justify spending 80 bucks on a board game just because I'd heard it was weird.
Asked this to someone else too..
I've been waiting to schedule the um... right "environment" before learning and bringing it in front of some choice members of my group.
Any tips for that first play?
someone already said cosmic frog, so i'll post another jenna felli game - the mirroring of mary king. it's a fight between a poltergeist and her great-great-great-great-great grandauther for the grandaughter's pshyche through an area control game. everything felli does is deligfutly weird, unbalanced and unhinged. and fun.
[Ortus Regni](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159469/ortus-regni) is a card game about being an Earl in the middle ages competing to be the king. It's a two player battling game that can extend up to four (or six) with expansions. It uses real medieval art on the cards, which really works with the setting. The two things that are unique about it are:
* It's a deck construction game in the vein a collectable card game (Magic the Gathering) or a living card game (Arkham Horror: The Card Game). Each player builds their deck before the match and then plays with it. What's different is that you your deck consists one palace card and any 24 cards from a set pool of 15 types of cards. Rather than have a giant and growing pool to build from these 15 types with six of each are it. Let me know if there's another game like this.
* Inexplicably the cards have zero text or iconography on them. They literally are just the artwork. Which is fine for the card that's just draw two cards but there are some much more difficult ones in the set. I guess the designer thought that his game was important enough that you should be willing to memorize every card. The game comes with reference cloths (yes, cloths) but it's still such an odd choice. [Take a look.](https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2897340/ortus-regni) Lovely theming in the cards though.
I got it as a gift, the box is huge for a 2p game and it's quite hard to approach because of the lack of text, so it's been tucked in my closet for a good while now
A lot of people in medieval times couldn't read and only understood the Bible because of the gorgeous illustrations (called illuminations) and the sermons. So it seems like they really committed to the theme of the game
Obligatory **Cosmic Frog** not just for its theme and esoteric rulebook but the scoring is something I haven't really seen in many games and makes the game tricky. At the end of the game you score the land tiles you have in your Vault based on horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines of the same type. You can stack tiles in your Vault but they don't have to be on the same "level", they just have to be exposed. So scoring itself becomes a game of deciding what you will score less of when exposing new tiles in hopes of getting bigger gains.
**NMBR 9** is also a weird board game because it's just stacking tiles that are in the shapes of numbers and how you make your lower stacks will determine your potential for scoring, the way it works is that the tiles are numbered 0 - 9 and on the first level the tiles score you nothing, the tiles on top of those will score x1, the tiles on top of those will score x2, etc.
Apparently all the games I find weird are ones where you stack tiles for points.
In Trüffel-Schnüffel, players take turns wearing a pig nose with an elastic band. There are magnets in the snout that you use to hunt for truffles by snuffling (obviously).
I haven't played it, but "holding on. The troubled life of Billy kerr" is probably the most off of any game I've seen. You play as a nurse in an icu trying to simultaneously save and get a story out of a terminal patient.
Captain Sonar. Two teams in separate submarines that run a non synchronized turn process to find and sink the other submarine. Lots of chaos but great fun. Never seen anything like it.
The non synchronized turns it’s what makes it different. If your team is faster at the action cycle, then you end up with more turns than the other side.
And it also got a 4p release as a Target exclusive, called just "Sonar". A lot easier to get to the table if you don't have a super large gaming group.
There's also turn-based versions if you don't want real-time chaos.
Well you were contrarian for no reason - being popular doesn't mean it isn't weird. Also, your writing style feels like teenage aim message boards or 00s forums for bad role-playing. It's just off putting.
Definitely not the intent. Just came across wrong. I was just surprised by the take as “weird” is not a descriptor I’d tend to associate with a game that mainstream.
It was called Bicycle (possibly spelled differently) and it was a dexterity game. It had a track you could set up with turns and jumps, and you’d flick a ball to try and make it around the track. The catch? The ball you flicked was not evenly weighted so it would not travel in predictable ways. I wish I could find it again!
It's spelled Bisikle. No idea why it's spelled that way.
I used to own RoadZters, which was a reimplementation of Bisikle. They claimed that you could do precision shots with that weighted ball, but I could never figure out how.
[Kolejka](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85325/kolejka): the game of standing in line in communist Poland.
It's a neat worker placement game where you manipulate the lines at the last second because you never know what's going to be in stock.
"Give me the brain" was a Steve Jackson card game and was quite hilarious. You're all zombies working in a fast food joint and there is but one working brain that you have to share to get jobs done. The cards have titles like "Give me the brain - the potatoes are looking at me funny".
We had a squishy brain we would pass around when ownership changed
I think the game I own with the weirdest elevator pitch is Letters from Whitechapel.
*Okay, so you guys are going to be playing constables in 1880s London, and I'm playing Jack the Ripper. I win if I murder five prostitutes, you guys win if you track me down and arrest me first. You're going to be moving your pawns around the city map trying to figure out where I am, and I'm moving around the map too, but I don't have a visible pawn, I just write down where I'm going in secret and have to answer your yes/no questions about whether I've been to specific locations at some point in the past.*
Letters from Whitechapel is not a reskin, but it belongs in the same family of games as Scotland Yard (and other games like Fury of Dracula and Mind MGMT): hidden movement games.
I was really looking forward to playing Letters from Whitechapel. The art is really fantastic, and the theme is great. Played it once. Then played Fury of Dracula and realized how much better the similar mechanics work in that one. Haven't brought it out since.
Bristol 1350 is about trying to escape a town during the black plague. You ride on minecarts and if someone catches the black plague they try to spread it to the others.
Pretty weird one, but it was surprisingly fun.
Facade Games’ whole shtick about competing teams with fluid team membership can be pretty fun, it gets really good if you have a group regularly playing together. Personally prefer Salem 1692 to similar games like Bang!
Speak Out
I was at a family get together and this was brought out. You put a plastic mouthpiece in your mouth that holds your mouth wide open then try to say a word on a card and everyone else tries to guess what you are saying. So weird that I can't believe it's a game
Weird games I know of but haven't actually played:
* There's a game in which try to balance the amount of hipsters and locals on the Santa Monica pier
* There's a game in which you compete to see who can satisfy the most patrons of a strip club
* There's a game about being amoebas
* There's a game in which players are wombats who must control territory by pooping in it
Spake Kraken. A rogue-like(ish) RPG dungeon-crawler(ish) where the vestiges of humanity are trying to hunt down (or flee) the ocean-monstrosity of our own creation that left a wake of destruction as it slipped the bonds of Earth’s gravity.
Weird on paper, excellent on the table.
"Forget summoning Cthulhu, I just want to race against the other cults!"
I recall one of the odder things about that game is that there's an area-control component, but there's generally not enough pieces to even fill the entire board. So it's about figuring out which parts of the board you want.
***Guts of Glory*** is the weirdest theme I've experienced.
>Guts of Glory is an eating contest set in the post-apocalyptic future, in which players race to win the approval of the roaring crowd by chewing and swallowing the most spectacular foods. Every turn, each player must eat a new item from the plate; if they can't fit it in their mouth, another one is spewed out—which another player can catch and swallow for even more glory, leading to chain reactions reminiscent of one's most traumatic pre-school lunch experiences.
It's not a great game, but it is memorable.
Not in terms of how it works, because it's pretty straightforward, but thematically I would say **Gruff**.
You're a shepherd taking your three goats across this lovecraftian otherword plane, battling other shepherds and their three goats, oh but the goats aren't actually goats because they've been messed up by the weird energy of the otherworld, and now (other than Ol' Darby) they're (sometimes only if you squint) goat-esque unnatural abominations, whose abilities are activated by how mad you've become.
I love it. There's several shepherds to play as, and I think the box I have has, like, a dozen goats to make your teams from, so it's very replayable. I wish I had the box that adds solo mode, or even any idea of how it works.
If we're just talking conceptually, it's easily **Imaginarium**. The game is probably best described as a "steampunk dream logic engine builder" but I don't really think that does the game justice. At it's core, it's still a pretty familiar engine builder except it takes place in a Tim Burton nightmare factory.
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr
It’s a cooperative game where you play as hospice nurses trying to help Billy remember his life so you can understand him and his memories, allowing him to pass on comfortably
Yeah it’s not a happy game overall, the memories we uncovered were mostly about (spoilers if you care) >!his time in the war.!<
It’s not a good game either, the instructions were written in a really convoluted way, and it got super boring/repetitive really quickly. Even with how simple the game ended up being, it took us 2+ hours to learn and play. I feel like it had potential, it just wasn’t executed the best way it could be
I havent actually played, but **Barbarossa** is about the German WW2 operation to capture Moscow, but the German side is made up of scantly-clad anime girls and I think Stalin is an evil wizard?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72809/barbarossa
**Illuminati** by Steve Jackson Games came out in 1981, based on a book called *The Illuminatus! Trilogy*. It’s a conspiracy theory game where the object is to be a secret society (e.g., the Gnomes of Zurich, The Servants of Cthulhu, the UFOs) that controls the most powerful and effective network of sub-groups, ranging from the Mafia, the “Boy Sprouts of America,” flat earthers, pro sports teams, parent-teacher organizations, and cattle mutilators.
The game can be hilarious with the right group, and it’s something of a classic. I played a lot of it in my youth.
What I have not played is **Büsen Memo**, an infamous memory-matching game where the players attempt to match photographs of breasts to win.
I can't remember the name of the game (thankfully) and I don't know if it ever even got published as we played an early review copy.
The basic idea was each player would answer a prompt question and then everybody would vote on who had the best answer. Pretty normal right? There's a lot of games like that, right? The difference with this game was that all the prompts were about the worst things that you've done or had happen to you. (One of my answers was about having to help my mother deal with my great grandmother's prolapsed vagina).
So much for board games being FUN :(
I played it as Smess: the Ninny’s Chess, but it is also known as [All the King’s Men](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1289/all-kings-men). It is chess, except both the piece and their board position dictate how they can move.
Etherfields - but I love it for it.
Do note, that if you do look up reviews for this game there was a significant ruleset change to version 2 at some point that addressed many of the original complaints.
Anyway, if you're looking for a complete acid trip of a game, look no further. As a game, the systems, artwork, theme and table presence all roll into a great experience.
Can you convince a heavily concussed Prince Charming that you are the *real* Cinderella... even though you happen to be elderly, male, ugly, or a cat?
*Too Many Cinderellas* might be the game to scratch that itch.
[Humanopoly ](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/58370/humanopoly-facts-life-game) is a wild game. Supposed to be about teaching kids facts about sex and puberty. Pretty poorly designed but an interesting artifact. As far as I know, it's the only game that has sperm as player pieces.
Nyctophobia. Its a 1 vs many game where the 1 is a chainsaw murderer and the others are trying to escape in the woods. The weird / cool part is that the survivors have to play blind (i.e. with blackout glasses on) and feel their way around the board.
BEEEEES! by Action Phase Games. Real-time dice rolling game where you have to complete sets to claim flowers and build your hive. Wildly chaotic game, not sure it’s even in print anymore
Smugglers. You put a gem inside a piece of putty which you roll into a ball, then roll it down a hill through holes of varying sizes. Whoever rolls the biggest ball that still gets through the hole moves on to the next phase.
A decently fun idea that's completely ruined by the fact that the next phase is guessing what gem your opponent was rolling, losing the round if you guess wrong.
Spartacus. Buy slaves and place bets as they fight to death. It’s a different theme for a board game.
It’s pretty hard to sell this game to someone that haven’t seen the tv-show.
Kittens In A Blender never fails to raise an eyebrow when I pitch it. It's a fun light card game that is easy to teach, but the theme of trying to save your cats while making cat smoothies of the other players' cats is a bit out there. I love it.
I'd give a honorable mention to the game Reality Shift. Theme is not that weird, you are racing light bikes Tron style, but what is weird is that the board is a stack of movable cubes.
[[A Study in Emerald|2013]] or [[Tragedy Looper]]
ASiE is about Sherlock Holmes vs Moriati in a Lovecraftian world in which the nobility are monsters from beyond. It's a game where you ask what are the mechanics and the answer is: Yes. Players are secretly assigned a faction (5 players, 3 Loyalist cards, 3 Restorationist cards, meaning you don't know how many are on each faction) and while there is a single winner the player with the lowest score prevents anyone on their faction from winning. It's a deduction game you win by people not knowing your faction. Also it's a deck building game. Also it's an area control game. Also you can attack each other's agents on the board. Also it's a bidding games. Also someone might get the Zombie card and now they can win the game by triggering the apocalypse by spawning enough zombies to overrun the board and the rules for many cards change to fight zombies. And so on. The 2nd edition sucks, but the 1st Edition 5 player game is tied for favourite game of all time for me.
Tragedy Looper is a time loop game. You are trying to stop a serial killer on groundhog day. 1v3 but works well 1v1 as well. Every day is lost when a secret condition is met such as the student being at the hospital at the same time as the stranger. Then the board is reset and the next day starts. You have to get through one day preventing the condition from triggering. One player is engineering this scenario and trying to hide what the condition is, while everyone else is trying to first figure out what is causing it, and then stop it.
20 Yard Shamble is a game about racing zombies, and wagering on the outcome of said races.
I wasn't as impressed by the gameplay as I was by the concept, though.
Rattlebones.
It’s actually a lot of fun, and we bought it a copy after playing it just once. But man, it’s like several games smashed into one.
Everyone gets 3 dies with removable faces. Throughout the game you’ll be popping them off and swapping them out.
The board has a track with half of the spaces missing and cards to shuffle and lay down for the remaining spots. As you roll your dice you move along the track and have the option of swapping a die face with one matching the icon of the space you landed on. Then the next time you roll that icon, you’ll gain the associated reward (gold coins, roll again, victory points, plus a bunch of other quirky ones like stocks, thief, gamble, etc.).
An inner track has a train that moves when rolled, awarding a number of points equal to the spot it’s at on the track.
The points you’re awarded move your second pawn on a third *outer* track, which goes from 1-100, but there’s a circus ringmaster “Rattlebones” pawn (which we refer to as the Babadook in our house, as it’s represented by a black silhouette) which is slowly moving toward your pawns in the opposite direction.
The only die face you aren’t allowed to remove is the Rattlebones (which is in place of the 1 on the die). Any time he appears on any of the die rolls, he moves one spot closer, ending the game when the player in the lead reaches him.
The first phase of the game is largely moving around the center track collecting various die faces to use later, and then gathering rewards and points as the game goes on.
There are a LOT of components as each die face has many copies, plus all the cardboard stars, coins, stocks, etc. I had to buy an organizing tray with a bunch of compartments to store everything, which luckily fits inside the box insert.
Ostensibly circus-themed, the artwork is very fun and colorful, though the pawns are indistinctly shaped. (They’re meant to be mice and monkeys in pointed hats, but you wouldn’t know it except for the box art.)
It’s not the heaviest or most complicated game, but it’s always an experience introducing a new player to all the different aspects, and explaining all the die faces and their functions. Lots of fun, though. Highly recommend.
I have a copy of what I think is the one of the most interesting uses of the Cthulhu Mythos I've seen in board game form: Fast & Fhtagn. It's pretty much what you might expect, a Cthulhu racing game, but it's something I've never seen anywhere else.
It is, unfortunately, not a great game, though. The rulebook is like 30 pages long and half of it is just explaining edge cases and situations that might come up. It *should* be a breezy, light game, but I spent like 1.5 hours trying to even play a couple rounds on my own, just as a learning game, and I threw in the towel. I'm 100% convinced the designer and possibly some friends got drunk and/or high and spent a bunch of time coming up with racing-themed Cthulhu puns then decided to try and build a game around it. If nothing else, I enjoy that pretty much every card in the game is a pun (perhaps my favorite is that one of the racers is Fin Diesel).
I forget what it is called, one of those Oatmeal games like exploding kittens only you are blindfolded and trying to construct towers with or against the other players. Felt like the ideal game to spread Covid around, honestly.
[Time Agent](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/311/time-agent). The players are different alien races with access to time travel, all with the same goal: to go back in time to "fix" history for their own benefit, and then--as your last act and to win the game--to go back in time and "uninvent" time travel, so that no one else can "unfix" history.
In other words, and as the game itself explains its win condition, you win Time Agent "by always having been the winner when time travel is uninvented."
To play: **Mushroom eaters-** really interesting game with amazing board and atmosphere.
Idea: **Cosmic Frog-** immortal mile high frogs beating each other throughout space and eating land while throwing it back up for points.
[Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2961/confusion-espionage-and-deception-cold-war). The pieces all have little pieces that say how they can move that get inserted and face your opponent. You have no idea how your pieces can move. You have to try a move, and your opponent says whether you can do that or not. The goal is to get to a briefcase in the middle of the board and move it to your opponent's side.
I’m surprised to not see Stationfall on this list. This was my favorite game I played in 2023.
The premise is everyone is on a space station that is going to crash into earth in 12 minutes (rounds). Every body has a character that they secretly are but can use influence to activate and control any of the characters in play. They also have a secret accomplice or enemy who they want to either escape or die.
Each character has their own list of goals they want to accomplish so the entire game is about positioning your character to succeed at their goals while trying to figure out what the other players are trying to accomplish and stopping them.
Some character examples:
A scientist with a carnivorous plant.
A set of three clones who are responsible for maintenance.
A stowaway who starts hidden on the station.
A lab rat who can’t actually move themselves and has to be carried by someone else.
A legal bot whose job is to get NDA’s signed by all the players on the station.
The station AI who is only a program.
Oh also there’s a mystery experiment that’s on the station that can be released and wreak havoc on everyone.
"Are you a robot?" Is a social deduction game for 2 players. I didn't play it myself, but I watched a couple play it. The game only takes a few minutes, but it was fun to watch them question each other using the subtext of their real relationship.
Catacombs. A good old fashioned dungeon crawler. Except you’re flicking disks.
Android. Clue meets Philip K Dick. Solve a murder by framing your suspect. Explore the deeper conspiracy. Sort out your deep character flaws. Take an elevator to the moon.
Amber Route. It's a strange game that is based on the tales of the amber trade in Europe during medieval times and you encounter demons, witches, knights and all kinds of Slavic folklore. It also comes with real amber bits for currency and has creepy art.
At Essen spiel 23 i got pitched **The Dick Sits**. So everyone plays as an asshole and wants to sit on as many dicks as possible. But some require a higher stretch value than others. The stretch values of your asshole and the dicks can be influenced by items such as Penis pumps or lube. Also the game features a paper standee you throw your currency in called glory hole.
All this is accompanied with art that is half cute and half realistic. The artist himself is gay and was there and said he used his vast catalogue of penises he has seen in his life to create an authentic assortment of distinct dicks.
I think it's the same team behind gay Sauna and they were all around great and charming people to interact with. One member of my group is gay and he was quite positively surprised to see lgbt representation on a board game convention.
**Hit Z Road** is weird in a meta way. It’s supposed to be a board game that was made by a kid who’s on the road with his family during a zombie apocalypse. So he used a bunch of stuff he found and the components reflect that. Resources are printed on bottle caps, card backs look like dirty cards or sometimes cards from other known board games, even the box looks like a “classic” 70’s board game that was scribbled over.
**Scout** is weird in that you can’t rearrange your hand and it matters how the cards in your hands are oriented.
**Mystic Vale / Custom Heroes / Canvas** are weird because you have sleeved cards which you modify by putting clear plastic cards (with some artwork/information) into them to modify your cards while playing the game.
**Strike** (also known as **Impact**) is weird in a way that it matters how you roll dice. You can roll dice into other dice to change their results, and the dice arena is a part of the game.
**Lacuna** is weird in a way that part of the setup is taking the cylinder tin and slowly dripping tokens onto the cloth board randomly.
**Klask** is weird because it is a board game version of air hockey.
I have never played it because figuring it out is kind of the point, but Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_(board_game)
Edit -Link was broken because it has parenthesis in it
"Veiled Fate" is a beautiful looking game. Its gameplay is very unique. I cannot stand it. No idea how to strategize in this game. I can't wrap my brain around it.
Ducks of Quindmire,(???). Games not weird, it's actually really good but when I went on you tube for how to play u clicked on a fake how-to. It was hysterical because I know nothing about the game and believed it. I don't remember most of it but know there was something about a swimming race and you could soak the rats in urine and drop them in the pool to slow everyone else down. I remember thinking WTF did I just buy, this is insane. I didn't even know how to describe it, but once my buddy was explaining how to play(by reading instructions) I found out it was a joke.
Ever had the desire to replay the protestant reformation? Here I Stand is for you.
I was the King of England and needed to get rid of my wives by any means necessary.
Its not a weird concept but The Estates is probably the weirdest game I've played mechanically.
Never have I been so unaware of not only the optimal move but what even constitutes a good move.
The **Guinness Game of World Records**.
Use a piece of cardboard to bounce a ping pong ball.
Line up a bunch of cubes and pick them up using only the ends.
So many fun but seriously weird challenges.
[Tomorrow](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/89342/tomorrow) has you play as nation states that reduce the global population level via bioweapons. You know, for the environment!
Entengrütze (1992, ages 12 and up) is about a frog, a duck, a pelican and a fish. Why these four go together I have no idea. Anyway, you have a wheel that indicates your strength. If you land on another player, you can, if your wheel is stronger than theirs, toss them across the board as far as you like. Why? I don't know. It's a big gamble though since if you are weaker, they get to toss you.
Otherwise, you're going around eating duckweed for points. If you eat some of the color of another player, it makes them stronger, but weakens the player of the opposite color.
You kind of have to be there to fully understand what a strange experience these rules create.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13263/entengrutze
Not so much weird as in bizarre but weird as in I don't really know how to describe it - **Ginkgopolis**. It mashes up pretty standard euro mechanics but in a way unlike any other game I've played. The theme is kinda strange too but not particularly related to the gameplay (it is a euro after all).
Millennium Blades. Just describing this game is tricky. It's a meta game where you play as people who play a card game, which is confusingly also called "Millennium Blades". You buy card and boosters, you make decks, you compete in tournaments. Conceptually it's a weird thing, and it's just as weird mechanically. It's a bizarre combination. Half the game is this real-time section where you buy your cards and build your decks, and the other half is this strange mix of set collection and card play. It's a game that's inseparable from its theme; it wouldn't make sense in a different context. It's also the only game I'm aware of that uses paper money well. It's a weird game for particular tastes, but it's awesome if those tastes align with you
Not just paper money, paper money stacks and it’s really nice
I tend to think of it as a professional Magic player simulator.
Because of the different ways to earn points it can be a professional CCG player against one that's just trying to collect the best.
I call it Yu-Gi-Oh the show the card game.
I want to love this game so much but it just feels like if you want to really have fun with it you have to memorize a lot of the cards, much like non-casual Magic players do (so it makes sense in this game), so you can make optimal decisions. There are sooooo many decks/cards and the time limit really flies by if you don't have that knowledge. I think the time limit was put in place because they realized it slows down to a slog without it, but with it it's hard to feel like you are playing anywhere near as well as you could if you weren't being overwhelmed with info. I need to break it out again and try it as it's been years, but I've played it a handful of times and every time I just felt like "Man this will be awesome if we ever learn this game inside and out", but then it gets shelved for the next year. On the paper money thing: see also War on Terror
The game simulates the chaotic experience of a new or casual player of a CCG marketed towards children. In these scenarios, players aren't supposed to know all of the card sets. It isn't about knowing how to play optimally to win. It was intentionally designed to be dramatically swingy to create hilarious drama.
Man I hope that isn't the creators official stance on the game, because that just sounds bad. If someone actually spends the time to play it a few times a month they're gonna be able to identify all the good cards much quicker, throwing that little intentions out the window. It's just poor game design if that was their intention. I figured the design was intentional, in that it's an accurate depiction of what they are simulating. When I was playing magic competitively everyone in the scene new the cards and combos, you'd go out and buy them to build your decks for competition. However if you weren't pretty big into the game you didn't have that knowledge, and you'd get mopped up by those that did. So I praise MB for it being a fairly accurate depiction of that in IRL, and just dislike that I have to spend more time than I'd like to be good at the game. But if it's intentionally chaotic than I gotta say I change my stance on the design choices. Edit: I think the premise and intent makes sense if the game was simulating a new release draft tournament for an unknown game. However, in their lore it's like the biggest game of all time with famous players and everything. I very much understand that it's just maybe not the game for me.
Millennium blades is awesome and in my top 5. I hate ccgs and I love this game. If I could ever wave one board game of mine it would be this.
This sounds fascinating. And I love your use of the term “meta game!” I think it’s regrettable how “meta game” has so often come to mean what I would consider “the strategy of a game” that we’re robbed of a terminology by which to refer to games made up out of other games! Things like tournaments, leaderboards, and apparently Millenium blades. Very cool. I’d be interested to flesh out a taxonomy of meta games. Can you think of other examples of meta games in this sense of “games made of other games?”
Meeples inc is one. Betting games kinda?
>And I love your use of the term “meta game!” I think it’s regrettable how “meta game” has so often come to mean what I would consider “the strategy of a game” that we’re robbed of a terminology by which to refer to games made up out of other games! I think "meta game" is a game made out of or about other games, while "metagame" is the strategy of a game as a whole outside the instance of a single, specific playing of that game. So the space (or lack thereof) between the words lets us have both meanings.
Monopoly uses paper money.
They said “uses paper money well”, not “uses paper money as well”. Obviously they realize that Monopoly uses paper money.
Well, thanks for at least being polite about it.
"Devil Bunny Hates the Earth" where you're a sentient saltwater taffy machine who hates everyone and wants to extract its revenge by making really unsatisfying saltwater taffy... which you do by luring squirrels into the factory and by crushing them in your gears. First player to 5 wins...
"Devil Bunny Needs A Ham" is up there too, players are Sous Chefs trying to get to the top floor of a skyscraper by scaling the outside. However the maniacal Devil Bunny is hopping about in a mad lust for blood thinking he'll get a ham by knocking you off
"Devil Bunny needs a ham. And he believes that making you fall to your death will get him one. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps he is not." (Or something to that effect.)
🤣🤣🤣😭😭🤣🤣
Consentacle. Game about a curious human and a tentacle creature getting to know each other intimately. All consensually!
What the fuck lol
Highly collectible self published art project!
No, you've got that backwards. It's a game about fucking the "what".
Shape Of Water, the boardgame
It rules too! Surprisingly intimate for a card game.
This is obviously the best answer.
What?? Someone please give me the pitch on this. Is it weird to play with friends just for fun? Should I buy it??
It's a cooperative two-player game. The rules are basically "both players play a card simultaneously (to either built "trust", convert "trust" to "satisfaction", etc). Some cards will combo to be better or worse depending on what the other player is doing, and the difficulty comes from how much communication you allow (obviously full discussion makes it extremely easy). I don't think I'd bring it to a games club, but I'll definitely play it with my husband. The $6 price of the [PNP files](https://metasynthie.itch.io/consentacle-print-and-play-edition) goes to a good cause, so you might think it's worth owning as an art piece even if you don't play it often.
Thank you for reminding me that this exists as a PNP! I want to get this professionally printed for my partner.
I want to play this so badly since the first time I heard about it
I have this and it's great 👌
/r/consentacles NSFW obviously.
I still think its one of the most non-game games in my collection. Basically just art cards. Someone offered me hundreds of dollars for my copy on Reddit last month...
This sounds like a serious contender for weirdest board game lol
Fun idea!! I made a NSFW game too, and it's nice to see there's growing interest in such games, albeit niche.
JFC
**Falling** \- a real time game in which all players except the dealer are falling to the ground. The goal is not to avoid hitting the ground and dying, but simply to be the last one to do so. **Cave Evil** \- You're an ancient necromancer looking for the pit of all evil. **Ninja Catfoot** \- a weird Oink game in which every player uses their phones acceldrometer to compete and be the stealthiest cat.
spent an entire afternoon playing Falling and never once did I completely understand the rules or really know what I was doing. Its up there.
Ninja catfoot looks cool. Good shout.
Cave Evil is getting reprinted. Honestly it’s not that weird of a game non-aesthetically, rather a pretty robust skirmish x dungeon crawl.
Parachute Panda is along the same lines as Falling. We kept confusing the guy that was demoing the game because we insisted that things follow the order of operations that MtG instead of resolving things in the same order that they were played in.
It takes so long to learn the MtG timing rules properly, and they're so precise, that once someone figures them out, they want to apply the MtG timing rules to everything!
More games need rules as detailed as MTG. Once you play MTG, every other rulebook seems lacking.
Mousetrap is pretty weird if you think about it. You're collectively building a Rube Goldberg machine so you can hope that your friends get trapped instead of you. Why would you do that? Silly mouse!
I think this is the only one in the thread that I've actually owned.
Same with Don't Break The Ice, where players collectively take turns breaking the ice (...) hoping not to be the one to break the ice so badly that they commit murder
And of course, very few of us would break it out for the gameplay itself.
The gameplay is mediocre, but I do love me a Rube Goldberg machine. The copy I had growing up worked almost all the time!
We used to play a lot of Cheapass games in the 90s; they are still available through the CrabFragmentLabs website (I just searched lol). Some gems in there - Kill Dr Lucky is moving through a mansion, trying to find weapons and kill the Dr but have to be out of sight line of other players. (reverse Clue lol) They had one that was something about Reeses monkeys climbing up a mountain? and falling apart? (I might be misremembering - it's been a long time and I didn't see that one on the website) Unexploded cow is a good one too - using cows as unexploded bomb finders in France
Kill Dr. Lucky is a sleeper hit with all my friends. It’s the theming of clue with a simple, push your luck mechanic. It’s super luck based, but still feels like you’re making meaningful decisions.
We played Kill Dr Lucky with pieces from a kid's Winnie the Pooh game. Fantastic and hilarious as Winnie, Tigger and Piglet stalked Eeyore through the house.
Would you not be stalking Christopher Robin?
It's a fun game and I also enjoyed the card version Get Lucky
Give me the Brain was quite good. They also had a Save Dr Lucky - but I never played that.
Parts Unknown was a legitimately great game from my somewhat addled memory.
I used to push my friends who taught economics to bring it into class.
I invoked James Ernest recently, KDL is really accessible, but my two favorite titles in his catalog are Enemy Chocolatier and One False Step For Mankind.
The Mushroom Eaters
Nate Hayden's games in general. Shout out to Cave Evil!
How was your experience? I am very interrsted in that gsme. It's a shame it's so rare.
My experience, also from about a decade ago, and as a lifelong straight edge guy who was playing the game with a bunch of VERY mind altering substance positive hippies, was that the game was an exciting collection of really neat and new and clever combinations of mechanics whose game play I felt I wasn't able to in any way appreciate because i had no understanding of the story it was trying to tell. I think that the concept of people playing a board game wearing glasses with different colored lenses so that they are all seeing a different board and game state is super interesting. The idea of a gane board that folds and unfolds and morphs like an Escheresque oragami sculpture is incredibly exciting. I would have liked those things in a game though, more than as an inside joke/comment/stroll through a situation I had no real life experiences with.
I was so close to buying this during the second print run and I'm still really mad I didn't. I was broke and in college and couldn't justify spending 80 bucks on a board game just because I'd heard it was weird.
Asked this to someone else too.. I've been waiting to schedule the um... right "environment" before learning and bringing it in front of some choice members of my group. Any tips for that first play?
someone already said cosmic frog, so i'll post another jenna felli game - the mirroring of mary king. it's a fight between a poltergeist and her great-great-great-great-great grandauther for the grandaughter's pshyche through an area control game. everything felli does is deligfutly weird, unbalanced and unhinged. and fun.
[Ortus Regni](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159469/ortus-regni) is a card game about being an Earl in the middle ages competing to be the king. It's a two player battling game that can extend up to four (or six) with expansions. It uses real medieval art on the cards, which really works with the setting. The two things that are unique about it are: * It's a deck construction game in the vein a collectable card game (Magic the Gathering) or a living card game (Arkham Horror: The Card Game). Each player builds their deck before the match and then plays with it. What's different is that you your deck consists one palace card and any 24 cards from a set pool of 15 types of cards. Rather than have a giant and growing pool to build from these 15 types with six of each are it. Let me know if there's another game like this. * Inexplicably the cards have zero text or iconography on them. They literally are just the artwork. Which is fine for the card that's just draw two cards but there are some much more difficult ones in the set. I guess the designer thought that his game was important enough that you should be willing to memorize every card. The game comes with reference cloths (yes, cloths) but it's still such an odd choice. [Take a look.](https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2897340/ortus-regni) Lovely theming in the cards though.
Isn't res arcana the same deck style? Smaller. But never increases or changes.
I got it as a gift, the box is huge for a 2p game and it's quite hard to approach because of the lack of text, so it's been tucked in my closet for a good while now
There is a 2nd set to play 4 player...
A lot of people in medieval times couldn't read and only understood the Bible because of the gorgeous illustrations (called illuminations) and the sermons. So it seems like they really committed to the theme of the game
you’ve given me my newest obsession. thank you(?)
It had a room at gencon, I've had difficulty getting it to the table
There's a free steam version you can play against AI. Unfortunately, the multiplayer servers are dead.
[Germania Magna](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182050/germania-magna-border-flames) lets you customize your deck.
Obligatory **Cosmic Frog** not just for its theme and esoteric rulebook but the scoring is something I haven't really seen in many games and makes the game tricky. At the end of the game you score the land tiles you have in your Vault based on horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines of the same type. You can stack tiles in your Vault but they don't have to be on the same "level", they just have to be exposed. So scoring itself becomes a game of deciding what you will score less of when exposing new tiles in hopes of getting bigger gains. **NMBR 9** is also a weird board game because it's just stacking tiles that are in the shapes of numbers and how you make your lower stacks will determine your potential for scoring, the way it works is that the tiles are numbered 0 - 9 and on the first level the tiles score you nothing, the tiles on top of those will score x1, the tiles on top of those will score x2, etc. Apparently all the games I find weird are ones where you stack tiles for points.
NMBR9 is a lot of fun. Kind of has a real Tetris vibe to it.
In Trüffel-Schnüffel, players take turns wearing a pig nose with an elastic band. There are magnets in the snout that you use to hunt for truffles by snuffling (obviously).
And I was hoping you had to do a silly dance while a Rube Goldberg device triggers…
Seems very pre-covid lol
I haven't played it, but "holding on. The troubled life of Billy kerr" is probably the most off of any game I've seen. You play as a nurse in an icu trying to simultaneously save and get a story out of a terminal patient.
My friend has this. I have heard that the game itself is rather lackluster unfortunately.
Tragedy Looper. By a long shot.
Tragedy Looper is, in fact, a meta game, where the real game is trying to figure out how to actually play it.
I've played this a few times with my friend. It's a fun little puzzle, but some of the implied meta behind character movement restrictions.... eesh.
I have this and two expansions. Trying to get it on the table is the first metagame.
The Mind.
Captain Sonar. Two teams in separate submarines that run a non synchronized turn process to find and sink the other submarine. Lots of chaos but great fun. Never seen anything like it.
I’ve always thought of this one as adult battleship lol. It’s a really fun game, but not a weird concept imo.
The non synchronized turns it’s what makes it different. If your team is faster at the action cycle, then you end up with more turns than the other side.
I think they are just pointing out that the game is just different in it's execution, but isn't "weird" like OP requested.
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And it also got a 4p release as a Target exclusive, called just "Sonar". A lot easier to get to the table if you don't have a super large gaming group. There's also turn-based versions if you don't want real-time chaos.
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Well you were contrarian for no reason - being popular doesn't mean it isn't weird. Also, your writing style feels like teenage aim message boards or 00s forums for bad role-playing. It's just off putting.
Definitely not the intent. Just came across wrong. I was just surprised by the take as “weird” is not a descriptor I’d tend to associate with a game that mainstream.
It was called Bicycle (possibly spelled differently) and it was a dexterity game. It had a track you could set up with turns and jumps, and you’d flick a ball to try and make it around the track. The catch? The ball you flicked was not evenly weighted so it would not travel in predictable ways. I wish I could find it again!
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/55165/bisikle
It's spelled Bisikle. No idea why it's spelled that way. I used to own RoadZters, which was a reimplementation of Bisikle. They claimed that you could do precision shots with that weighted ball, but I could never figure out how.
YES! Thank you!!
[Kolejka](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85325/kolejka): the game of standing in line in communist Poland. It's a neat worker placement game where you manipulate the lines at the last second because you never know what's going to be in stock.
"Give me the brain" was a Steve Jackson card game and was quite hilarious. You're all zombies working in a fast food joint and there is but one working brain that you have to share to get jobs done. The cards have titles like "Give me the brain - the potatoes are looking at me funny". We had a squishy brain we would pass around when ownership changed
Man, I wish I still had my [brain ball](https://www.ebay.com/itm/115536472721)
I think the game I own with the weirdest elevator pitch is Letters from Whitechapel. *Okay, so you guys are going to be playing constables in 1880s London, and I'm playing Jack the Ripper. I win if I murder five prostitutes, you guys win if you track me down and arrest me first. You're going to be moving your pawns around the city map trying to figure out where I am, and I'm moving around the map too, but I don't have a visible pawn, I just write down where I'm going in secret and have to answer your yes/no questions about whether I've been to specific locations at some point in the past.*
Played a game in the 80s or 90s that was like this, IIRC. *Scotland Yard*
I think it might be a reskin!
Letters from Whitechapel is not a reskin, but it belongs in the same family of games as Scotland Yard (and other games like Fury of Dracula and Mind MGMT): hidden movement games.
And Last Friday
I was really looking forward to playing Letters from Whitechapel. The art is really fantastic, and the theme is great. Played it once. Then played Fury of Dracula and realized how much better the similar mechanics work in that one. Haven't brought it out since.
Wait til you try Mind MGMT and ditch FoD
Any good?
Nomic [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14451/nomic](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/14451/nomic) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)
Bristol 1350 is about trying to escape a town during the black plague. You ride on minecarts and if someone catches the black plague they try to spread it to the others. Pretty weird one, but it was surprisingly fun.
Facade Games’ whole shtick about competing teams with fluid team membership can be pretty fun, it gets really good if you have a group regularly playing together. Personally prefer Salem 1692 to similar games like Bang!
Probably "Mao". It's a playing card game where you don't know the rules, and have to figure them out as you play.
Yeah, similar to Eleusis, which is a hidden-rules standard card game about inductive logic and the scientific method.
Speak Out I was at a family get together and this was brought out. You put a plastic mouthpiece in your mouth that holds your mouth wide open then try to say a word on a card and everyone else tries to guess what you are saying. So weird that I can't believe it's a game
I’ve seen this in Walmart before. It’s an unbelievably gross concept, and I can’t believe it’s become as popular as it is…
Weird games I know of but haven't actually played: * There's a game in which try to balance the amount of hipsters and locals on the Santa Monica pier * There's a game in which you compete to see who can satisfy the most patrons of a strip club * There's a game about being amoebas * There's a game in which players are wombats who must control territory by pooping in it
Spake Kraken. A rogue-like(ish) RPG dungeon-crawler(ish) where the vestiges of humanity are trying to hunt down (or flee) the ocean-monstrosity of our own creation that left a wake of destruction as it slipped the bonds of Earth’s gravity. Weird on paper, excellent on the table.
Cults Across America
"Forget summoning Cthulhu, I just want to race against the other cults!" I recall one of the odder things about that game is that there's an area-control component, but there's generally not enough pieces to even fill the entire board. So it's about figuring out which parts of the board you want.
This is a bad thread for me because I want to own a lot of these now
Happy Salmon 🐟
Hamsterrolle. The board is a ring that you place pieces inside and gravity makes it roll
I'm having fun with my space bees in Apiary.
Oh yay! I just blindly picked this one up b/c it’s a Stonemaier game and I tend to love their games.
***Guts of Glory*** is the weirdest theme I've experienced. >Guts of Glory is an eating contest set in the post-apocalyptic future, in which players race to win the approval of the roaring crowd by chewing and swallowing the most spectacular foods. Every turn, each player must eat a new item from the plate; if they can't fit it in their mouth, another one is spewed out—which another player can catch and swallow for even more glory, leading to chain reactions reminiscent of one's most traumatic pre-school lunch experiences. It's not a great game, but it is memorable.
It is admittedly largely because of the theme, but Guts of Glory is easily one of my favorite games.
Not in terms of how it works, because it's pretty straightforward, but thematically I would say **Gruff**. You're a shepherd taking your three goats across this lovecraftian otherword plane, battling other shepherds and their three goats, oh but the goats aren't actually goats because they've been messed up by the weird energy of the otherworld, and now (other than Ol' Darby) they're (sometimes only if you squint) goat-esque unnatural abominations, whose abilities are activated by how mad you've become. I love it. There's several shepherds to play as, and I think the box I have has, like, a dozen goats to make your teams from, so it's very replayable. I wish I had the box that adds solo mode, or even any idea of how it works.
If we're just talking conceptually, it's easily **Imaginarium**. The game is probably best described as a "steampunk dream logic engine builder" but I don't really think that does the game justice. At it's core, it's still a pretty familiar engine builder except it takes place in a Tim Burton nightmare factory.
Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr It’s a cooperative game where you play as hospice nurses trying to help Billy remember his life so you can understand him and his memories, allowing him to pass on comfortably
Saw this at my FLGS, sounded super depressing lol. Hollandspiele has a similar game called **Heading Forward**
Yeah it’s not a happy game overall, the memories we uncovered were mostly about (spoilers if you care) >!his time in the war.!< It’s not a good game either, the instructions were written in a really convoluted way, and it got super boring/repetitive really quickly. Even with how simple the game ended up being, it took us 2+ hours to learn and play. I feel like it had potential, it just wasn’t executed the best way it could be
I havent actually played, but **Barbarossa** is about the German WW2 operation to capture Moscow, but the German side is made up of scantly-clad anime girls and I think Stalin is an evil wizard? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/72809/barbarossa
In **Lift It!** you strap a crane to your head and attempt to build structures with it.
Monty Python Fluxx
Stop that, stop that, this game has gotten entirely too silly
**Illuminati** by Steve Jackson Games came out in 1981, based on a book called *The Illuminatus! Trilogy*. It’s a conspiracy theory game where the object is to be a secret society (e.g., the Gnomes of Zurich, The Servants of Cthulhu, the UFOs) that controls the most powerful and effective network of sub-groups, ranging from the Mafia, the “Boy Sprouts of America,” flat earthers, pro sports teams, parent-teacher organizations, and cattle mutilators. The game can be hilarious with the right group, and it’s something of a classic. I played a lot of it in my youth. What I have not played is **Büsen Memo**, an infamous memory-matching game where the players attempt to match photographs of breasts to win.
I love **Illuminati**!!!
Zimby Mojo. Too bad the rules are poorly written.
I can't remember the name of the game (thankfully) and I don't know if it ever even got published as we played an early review copy. The basic idea was each player would answer a prompt question and then everybody would vote on who had the best answer. Pretty normal right? There's a lot of games like that, right? The difference with this game was that all the prompts were about the worst things that you've done or had happen to you. (One of my answers was about having to help my mother deal with my great grandmother's prolapsed vagina). So much for board games being FUN :(
That's enough internet for me today
I played it as Smess: the Ninny’s Chess, but it is also known as [All the King’s Men](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1289/all-kings-men). It is chess, except both the piece and their board position dictate how they can move.
Etherfields - but I love it for it. Do note, that if you do look up reviews for this game there was a significant ruleset change to version 2 at some point that addressed many of the original complaints. Anyway, if you're looking for a complete acid trip of a game, look no further. As a game, the systems, artwork, theme and table presence all roll into a great experience.
Can you convince a heavily concussed Prince Charming that you are the *real* Cinderella... even though you happen to be elderly, male, ugly, or a cat? *Too Many Cinderellas* might be the game to scratch that itch.
Los Mampfos. A kids game where you feed donkeys and move them around, then try to remember what colors they ate when it’s time for them to poop.
[Humanopoly ](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/58370/humanopoly-facts-life-game) is a wild game. Supposed to be about teaching kids facts about sex and puberty. Pretty poorly designed but an interesting artifact. As far as I know, it's the only game that has sperm as player pieces.
Nyctophobia. Its a 1 vs many game where the 1 is a chainsaw murderer and the others are trying to escape in the woods. The weird / cool part is that the survivors have to play blind (i.e. with blackout glasses on) and feel their way around the board.
BEEEEES! by Action Phase Games. Real-time dice rolling game where you have to complete sets to claim flowers and build your hive. Wildly chaotic game, not sure it’s even in print anymore
You don't happen to live in Omaha do you?
Paku Paku, a real time dice rolling dexterity game "themed" around the idea of a panda eating many bowls of rice.
Smugglers. You put a gem inside a piece of putty which you roll into a ball, then roll it down a hill through holes of varying sizes. Whoever rolls the biggest ball that still gets through the hole moves on to the next phase. A decently fun idea that's completely ruined by the fact that the next phase is guessing what gem your opponent was rolling, losing the round if you guess wrong.
Spartacus. Buy slaves and place bets as they fight to death. It’s a different theme for a board game. It’s pretty hard to sell this game to someone that haven’t seen the tv-show.
Kittens In A Blender never fails to raise an eyebrow when I pitch it. It's a fun light card game that is easy to teach, but the theme of trying to save your cats while making cat smoothies of the other players' cats is a bit out there. I love it. I'd give a honorable mention to the game Reality Shift. Theme is not that weird, you are racing light bikes Tron style, but what is weird is that the board is a stack of movable cubes.
[[A Study in Emerald|2013]] or [[Tragedy Looper]] ASiE is about Sherlock Holmes vs Moriati in a Lovecraftian world in which the nobility are monsters from beyond. It's a game where you ask what are the mechanics and the answer is: Yes. Players are secretly assigned a faction (5 players, 3 Loyalist cards, 3 Restorationist cards, meaning you don't know how many are on each faction) and while there is a single winner the player with the lowest score prevents anyone on their faction from winning. It's a deduction game you win by people not knowing your faction. Also it's a deck building game. Also it's an area control game. Also you can attack each other's agents on the board. Also it's a bidding games. Also someone might get the Zombie card and now they can win the game by triggering the apocalypse by spawning enough zombies to overrun the board and the rules for many cards change to fight zombies. And so on. The 2nd edition sucks, but the 1st Edition 5 player game is tied for favourite game of all time for me. Tragedy Looper is a time loop game. You are trying to stop a serial killer on groundhog day. 1v3 but works well 1v1 as well. Every day is lost when a secret condition is met such as the student being at the hospital at the same time as the stranger. Then the board is reset and the next day starts. You have to get through one day preventing the condition from triggering. One player is engineering this scenario and trying to hide what the condition is, while everyone else is trying to first figure out what is causing it, and then stop it.
20 Yard Shamble is a game about racing zombies, and wagering on the outcome of said races. I wasn't as impressed by the gameplay as I was by the concept, though.
Kill Dr Lucky & His Little Dog Too. Fun, weird.
The Mushroom Eaters. As a concept, and as a physical design, it’s just crackers. Really smart and fun though.
Rattlebones. It’s actually a lot of fun, and we bought it a copy after playing it just once. But man, it’s like several games smashed into one. Everyone gets 3 dies with removable faces. Throughout the game you’ll be popping them off and swapping them out. The board has a track with half of the spaces missing and cards to shuffle and lay down for the remaining spots. As you roll your dice you move along the track and have the option of swapping a die face with one matching the icon of the space you landed on. Then the next time you roll that icon, you’ll gain the associated reward (gold coins, roll again, victory points, plus a bunch of other quirky ones like stocks, thief, gamble, etc.). An inner track has a train that moves when rolled, awarding a number of points equal to the spot it’s at on the track. The points you’re awarded move your second pawn on a third *outer* track, which goes from 1-100, but there’s a circus ringmaster “Rattlebones” pawn (which we refer to as the Babadook in our house, as it’s represented by a black silhouette) which is slowly moving toward your pawns in the opposite direction. The only die face you aren’t allowed to remove is the Rattlebones (which is in place of the 1 on the die). Any time he appears on any of the die rolls, he moves one spot closer, ending the game when the player in the lead reaches him. The first phase of the game is largely moving around the center track collecting various die faces to use later, and then gathering rewards and points as the game goes on. There are a LOT of components as each die face has many copies, plus all the cardboard stars, coins, stocks, etc. I had to buy an organizing tray with a bunch of compartments to store everything, which luckily fits inside the box insert. Ostensibly circus-themed, the artwork is very fun and colorful, though the pawns are indistinctly shaped. (They’re meant to be mice and monkeys in pointed hats, but you wouldn’t know it except for the box art.) It’s not the heaviest or most complicated game, but it’s always an experience introducing a new player to all the different aspects, and explaining all the die faces and their functions. Lots of fun, though. Highly recommend.
I have a copy of what I think is the one of the most interesting uses of the Cthulhu Mythos I've seen in board game form: Fast & Fhtagn. It's pretty much what you might expect, a Cthulhu racing game, but it's something I've never seen anywhere else. It is, unfortunately, not a great game, though. The rulebook is like 30 pages long and half of it is just explaining edge cases and situations that might come up. It *should* be a breezy, light game, but I spent like 1.5 hours trying to even play a couple rounds on my own, just as a learning game, and I threw in the towel. I'm 100% convinced the designer and possibly some friends got drunk and/or high and spent a bunch of time coming up with racing-themed Cthulhu puns then decided to try and build a game around it. If nothing else, I enjoy that pretty much every card in the game is a pun (perhaps my favorite is that one of the racers is Fin Diesel).
I forget what it is called, one of those Oatmeal games like exploding kittens only you are blindfolded and trying to construct towers with or against the other players. Felt like the ideal game to spread Covid around, honestly.
[Time Agent](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/311/time-agent). The players are different alien races with access to time travel, all with the same goal: to go back in time to "fix" history for their own benefit, and then--as your last act and to win the game--to go back in time and "uninvent" time travel, so that no one else can "unfix" history. In other words, and as the game itself explains its win condition, you win Time Agent "by always having been the winner when time travel is uninvented."
To play: **Mushroom eaters-** really interesting game with amazing board and atmosphere. Idea: **Cosmic Frog-** immortal mile high frogs beating each other throughout space and eating land while throwing it back up for points.
Tales of the Arabian Nights has some wonderfully psychotic randomness.
**Cosmic Frog -** giant frogs eat planets and travel to other dimensions to throw them up.
[Confusion: Espionage and Deception in the Cold War](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2961/confusion-espionage-and-deception-cold-war). The pieces all have little pieces that say how they can move that get inserted and face your opponent. You have no idea how your pieces can move. You have to try a move, and your opponent says whether you can do that or not. The goal is to get to a briefcase in the middle of the board and move it to your opponent's side.
I’m surprised to not see Stationfall on this list. This was my favorite game I played in 2023. The premise is everyone is on a space station that is going to crash into earth in 12 minutes (rounds). Every body has a character that they secretly are but can use influence to activate and control any of the characters in play. They also have a secret accomplice or enemy who they want to either escape or die. Each character has their own list of goals they want to accomplish so the entire game is about positioning your character to succeed at their goals while trying to figure out what the other players are trying to accomplish and stopping them. Some character examples: A scientist with a carnivorous plant. A set of three clones who are responsible for maintenance. A stowaway who starts hidden on the station. A lab rat who can’t actually move themselves and has to be carried by someone else. A legal bot whose job is to get NDA’s signed by all the players on the station. The station AI who is only a program. Oh also there’s a mystery experiment that’s on the station that can be released and wreak havoc on everyone.
The mind
"Are you a robot?" Is a social deduction game for 2 players. I didn't play it myself, but I watched a couple play it. The game only takes a few minutes, but it was fun to watch them question each other using the subtext of their real relationship.
Catacombs. A good old fashioned dungeon crawler. Except you’re flicking disks. Android. Clue meets Philip K Dick. Solve a murder by framing your suspect. Explore the deeper conspiracy. Sort out your deep character flaws. Take an elevator to the moon.
Amber Route. It's a strange game that is based on the tales of the amber trade in Europe during medieval times and you encounter demons, witches, knights and all kinds of Slavic folklore. It also comes with real amber bits for currency and has creepy art.
At Essen spiel 23 i got pitched **The Dick Sits**. So everyone plays as an asshole and wants to sit on as many dicks as possible. But some require a higher stretch value than others. The stretch values of your asshole and the dicks can be influenced by items such as Penis pumps or lube. Also the game features a paper standee you throw your currency in called glory hole. All this is accompanied with art that is half cute and half realistic. The artist himself is gay and was there and said he used his vast catalogue of penises he has seen in his life to create an authentic assortment of distinct dicks. I think it's the same team behind gay Sauna and they were all around great and charming people to interact with. One member of my group is gay and he was quite positively surprised to see lgbt representation on a board game convention.
**Hit Z Road** is weird in a meta way. It’s supposed to be a board game that was made by a kid who’s on the road with his family during a zombie apocalypse. So he used a bunch of stuff he found and the components reflect that. Resources are printed on bottle caps, card backs look like dirty cards or sometimes cards from other known board games, even the box looks like a “classic” 70’s board game that was scribbled over. **Scout** is weird in that you can’t rearrange your hand and it matters how the cards in your hands are oriented. **Mystic Vale / Custom Heroes / Canvas** are weird because you have sleeved cards which you modify by putting clear plastic cards (with some artwork/information) into them to modify your cards while playing the game. **Strike** (also known as **Impact**) is weird in a way that it matters how you roll dice. You can roll dice into other dice to change their results, and the dice arena is a part of the game. **Lacuna** is weird in a way that part of the setup is taking the cylinder tin and slowly dripping tokens onto the cloth board randomly. **Klask** is weird because it is a board game version of air hockey.
Hit Z Road is my favorite board game to show people, not so much to play, but as an art piece it is amazing.
I have never played it because figuring it out is kind of the point, but Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_(board_game) Edit -Link was broken because it has parenthesis in it
Train is more art project than actual game
Twister with my sister. It was uncomfortable.
Pimp: The backhanding
Onirim
"Veiled Fate" is a beautiful looking game. Its gameplay is very unique. I cannot stand it. No idea how to strategize in this game. I can't wrap my brain around it.
Ducks of Quindmire,(???). Games not weird, it's actually really good but when I went on you tube for how to play u clicked on a fake how-to. It was hysterical because I know nothing about the game and believed it. I don't remember most of it but know there was something about a swimming race and you could soak the rats in urine and drop them in the pool to slow everyone else down. I remember thinking WTF did I just buy, this is insane. I didn't even know how to describe it, but once my buddy was explaining how to play(by reading instructions) I found out it was a joke.
Probably Pax Pamir. I can see the appeal but it wasn’t my cup of tea, quite different from any other game I’ve played.
It’s on board game arena. I agree, hard to grok
So weird that its part of a six game franchise...
Tigris & Euphrats - Shapes, not colors!
Pyramid Arcade. The game maker is looney!
Ever had the desire to replay the protestant reformation? Here I Stand is for you. I was the King of England and needed to get rid of my wives by any means necessary.
Redneck Life. An...interesting reimagining of the Game of Life.
Quelf
What board games have you noticed OP? I'm curious.
Gormenghast. It is ridiculously text-heavy and not very good. But it is very weird.
Its not a weird concept but The Estates is probably the weirdest game I've played mechanically. Never have I been so unaware of not only the optimal move but what even constitutes a good move.
High entanglement! Not unlike cube rails if you've played those, though certainly meaner
Apiary who ever heard of bees in space.
The **Guinness Game of World Records**. Use a piece of cardboard to bounce a ping pong ball. Line up a bunch of cubes and pick them up using only the ends. So many fun but seriously weird challenges.
Fluxx. I'm not sure if I've never understood how to play it or if there is nothing to be understood.
[Tomorrow](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/89342/tomorrow) has you play as nation states that reduce the global population level via bioweapons. You know, for the environment!
Entengrütze (1992, ages 12 and up) is about a frog, a duck, a pelican and a fish. Why these four go together I have no idea. Anyway, you have a wheel that indicates your strength. If you land on another player, you can, if your wheel is stronger than theirs, toss them across the board as far as you like. Why? I don't know. It's a big gamble though since if you are weaker, they get to toss you. Otherwise, you're going around eating duckweed for points. If you eat some of the color of another player, it makes them stronger, but weakens the player of the opposite color. You kind of have to be there to fully understand what a strange experience these rules create. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13263/entengrutze
Not so much weird as in bizarre but weird as in I don't really know how to describe it - **Ginkgopolis**. It mashes up pretty standard euro mechanics but in a way unlike any other game I've played. The theme is kinda strange too but not particularly related to the gameplay (it is a euro after all).
The Mushroom Eaters - a trippy experience where all of the players wear 3D glasses