"Strangest game you have ever done" Topic

This is totally subjective, of course. There are no wrong answers, unless you consider Gettysburg strange.

I have two to claim as my strangest.

One was the Ork invasion of Canada in 1885 through the Stargate. I had lots of Orcs, lots of Riel's Rebellion Canadians and a Stargate. I used TSATF of course.

The other was the IRA versus flying saucers.

Roman Zombies popping up in WW2….

My army of fossilized tree stems with clay arms versus an army of figures made from grass with mouse skulls for heads, all fighting over a partially exposed dinosaur (maisasaur if I remember right).

The fun of college geology camp in the middle of no where.

Selenites converting colonists into walking bombs to throw against the french foreign legion investigating missing colonists in the steaming jungle of the moon's interior!

A role playing game with player character crawdad with memories of five minutes or less…

Aliens attacking both Americans and Germans during the battle of the bulge.

Game with no dice, charts, rules, or stage prop Coke cans in sight. Just dirt clods and old 1/35 models and Green army men on open field of decaying corn stalks. Armor penetrations by heavier rocks.

I have considered gaming scenarios based off of essays appearing on my students' tests. For example, years ago one student explained how Alexander the Great was killed by Vikings and other identified Hannibal as the leader of a tribe of Indians (the Carthage Indians, as opposed to the Carthaginians). Woodland Indians led by Hannibal and equipped with war elephants -- just think of the possibilities.

Not sure this counts but:

Laid out a terrain, a bit hilly, with a strongpoint
at the mil crest of the hill. The objective was for
the player (only one) to observe the action of his
forces, issue orders (OR NOT) depending upon how he
felt his force was doing AND what else he could observe
(there were other forces on the table, not his but he
could see them as they moved, changed formation, etc.)

No rules, no die rolls for combat, etc. Just the player
observing, receiving reports (darned few of those) and
issuing orders.

The player was Larry Brom and he loved the hell out of
it. Claimed that it must have been 'like this' for a
real brigade commander (Napoleonic period).

BTW, his brigade did take its objective, albeit with
significant casualties…

A game of Picquet played at Twistercon some years ago. The rules ere frustrating and the GM was high on prescription drugs. My best friend, the other French player, agrees with me.

My games suddenly seem dull and conventional compared to many of these.

1864 along the Rio Grande. First turn saw a Confederate vs Union battle. Second turn bagpipes were heard and the British came over a hill to fight the Union. Next turn saw a group of Mexicans asking the Union player for permission to cross the Rio Grande. They were given permission just as some French Foreign Legion came after them. They asked permission to cross, too, to fight the Mexicans. The Union player said no and faced a unit at them just as the ground trembled. A herd of buffalo slammed into a British-Union melee and did a lot of damage indiscriminately. Now that was a fun game that is still talked about ;)
John

Ogre Smash where to play one had to have a nice clay model and then as damage was taken – your model was slowly destroyed…

But also remember a game in the back yard with my father, lots of marx and mpc world war II figures and vehicles and a lot of fire crackers…

Aliens looking for earth women to implant there evil seed. they captured a few but could never get there die roll for well you know.

British surrendered at Dunkirk, gave Germany Canada in exchange for keeping the rest of the empire and getting their prisoners back. Germans invade USA in 1940.

Panzer I, II, III vs M1917 tanks and P12 fighters along the US Canadian border.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

A FOW game with a lot of Tigers.

A game about a student protest where the protesters got points for holding certain buildings. One player was the anarchist with the goal of getting somebody shot. One player represented students that supported the administration, one player was the university administration and the rest were various student activist groups. Used dominoes to represent groups of students with the pips indicating the strength of the group. The players had to move around the campus trying to rally student groups to their cause.

Driving down to Florida from Virginia, played an RPG with my wife using a dice rolling app and my son marking down hits on some paper in the back seat.

It was fun and the trip went by fast.

Matthew

Those all sound like perfectly normal scenarios to me (except for Phil Dutre's), so I may not be the target population. So, my strangest game is strange in a slightly different way than an odd scenario …

Split Singularity – Nothing makes me angrier than mad scientists! In their quest for free energy, the brainiacs at KopfSchmerz Labs created a stable singularity. Being really smart, but not particularly physically adept, one of them dropped it on the floor and it shattered. Which it shouldn't be able to do. But it did. With a BIG boom.

Chaos and havoc has been unleashed on the world and the UN has invited anyone stupid … er … bold enough to help to try to clean up and contain the shattered pieces of the singularity. Your team (as well as those other guys, over there) has taken up the challenge.

Teams start distributed along the edge of the blown up lab board. There are four identical tokens (pennies) on the board per team. Two of each are plain, two of each are wild (green paint dot on the tails side). All tokens are shuffled and distributed evenly across the board, heads up.

A figure can pick up a penny by walking over it. Figures can carry as many singularities as they want, since they have both infinite and no mass at the same time.

When one of your figures picks up a plain singularity bit, take a business card, and in one minute write a new rule for the game. If a figure picks up a wild singularity but, pick another player to take a business card and write a new rule for the game.

Generally, we play this with teams of four, two-die QILS characters on a large (1mx2m) dinner table, covered with lots of terrain, and a few hazardous terrain bits.

Favourite Invented Rules I Can Remember Right Now:

– On whatever turn I wrote this, the zombified corpses of the Kopfschmerz scientists rise up and attack the closest living things.

– All shots bend sixty degrees before hitting a terrain piece that is mostly green.

– At the end of your turn, teleport one piece of terrain.

– After your turn, hum a song. The first player who hasn't taken a turn this round to name the song goes next.

– Instead of taking damage, two-die figures that are hit split into two one-die figures.

– End of Round: Roll a die. On 5, 6 each figure loses one singularity. Redistribute on board.

– Everyone must roll dice with their left hand.

– All teams get two reinforcements on their next turn.

… oh yeah, the player with the most singularities at the end of the game wins.

Ran a pirate game over 15 years, (that is still talked about) ago where participants could earn extra doubloons (points) to buy additional powder, guns, and crew for their ships by showing up to the game dressed like a pirate and participate in the "Pirate Fashion Show", as well as get extra points, (doubloons) by singing a Pirate Song, and doing a dance…

All in all it was most entertaining….

And the game totally rocked…

Zulus trying to fight off giant spacemen, or sic-Fi adventurers fighting off hordes of Pygmies, depends which way you look at it. Anyway the Zulus wre 15mm and the scifi types 28mm.

While sleeping on the sidewalk outside the stadium to buy tickets for the 1982 World Series, my buddy and I played a game of Melee. We had nothing but a notepad and pen, so we drew a hex board, made an origami D6 and got to it. The motorcycle club next to us were fascinated.

Many, many years ago, I ran my friends through a Walker Wars game at a convention on one of the open tables. It was a supplement game in Macho Women With Guns in which each player controls one or more 'old coots' vying for dominance of the tapioca pudding in the cafeteria. You fended off rivals with pill bottles, false teeth, slippers and canes all the while avoiding falls (I can't get up!), broken hips, memory loss etc. The names of the coots were classics such as "The Geriatric Gladiator", "The Depends Dynamo" etc. Grew a bit of a crowd, and was an absolute blast. I was pestered repeatedly the entire weekend to run more games, it was the closest I've ever gotten to running a con game.

One of my buds converts weird games to miniatures and runs them at the local cons, notably "Globbo" (a baby sitting machine trying to kill the kids, which can explode or bite) and "A Fistful of Turkeys" (a turkey farmer vs. the turkeys).
I supply most of the minis.

To liven things up a bit for my group, I set up a pretty generic ACW skirmish game for a couple friends once. After a few turns of pot-shotting, a horde of goblins burst forth from a large wood onto their flanks. They hacked at both sides indiscriminately. The players could continue to fight each other or join forces to fight the common(and larger)foe. Their choice. One player was OK with it, the other was somewhat pissed off. Ha! I, on the other hand, enjoyed it quite a bit.

Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. A game of romance, seduction, dating, dining, intrigue and espionage in old Vienna. Wine, women and song and spending other peoples money while you try and conquer the world doing, not the goose-step but the two-step.

I'm presently finishing up a game for 'The Weekend" convention in June which is a miniaturization of the old Greg Costykian game of "Bug Eyed Monsters from Outer Space, they want our women!" It's a game which doesn't keep much of the original board game but the concept. Very little dice rolling but lots of big handsome figures (10" tall flats of people from the 1950's and 60' and of course the BEM's. The game uses primarily knowledge of the awful "B" sci- fi and horror movies of the time (50's and 60's) as the decision structures. For example-- Want to subdue Bess Budge (pulchritude 6) while she's asleep and carry her off to the saucer without alerting the rest of the household? Just answer a question like "What is an interofiter?" or "Who played Altaira in the movie Forbiden Planet?" If you can't answer that, then you are allowed to make up your own question to try and stump the rest of the players. If they can't answer it (and the umpire allows it) then you can grab Bess anyway. If you can't do that! then all you have to do (the most dreaded words in war games) is stand on a chair and SING for us a theme song from some 1950's television show…

GREEEEEEN ACRES is the place to be…
Farm livin' is the life for me…

These games are not for people who have had a quadruple humor bybass.

I staged a game to "playtest" a new rules set I had bought. The other two players thought it was a pirate treasure hunt game with three competing bands of pirates on a small island. They each had six pirates with smoothbore flintlock muskets and flintlock pistols. I had a time gate where I gated in three future Star Trek figures with phasers. Unfortunately for them, they did not combine forces on me so I was able to stun sufficient figures to grab the gold and gate back to the future. They were both rather annoyed with that scenario.

An RPG rather than a wargame but we ran a mixture of Vampire the Masquerade and Warhammer 40K for several months.

Dark Ages pagans vs Christians…but with a ball. The troops carrying it losing a round of melee lost control of the ball. You had to carry it the length of the battlefield to win.
We played it one Halloween.

1976, 7 days in May war game, new crews, student militias, political militias, marines, the army, secret service….. Man it was weird …. I remember Walter Cronkite and the news crew fighting off the National socialist militia with French marines at the embassy while getting the Trudeaus out of town. Jimmy carter was holed up with two tanks and marine one with some Russian and American marines, while the army was storming the congress and the White House. Wild

WWII rapid fire…..bears no relation to WWII whatsoever