Wow, that's a real downer of a title isn't it? But admit it, if you have been in the role-playing game hobby (or even any other type of game, be it board, card, war, or video) long enough, you too have a game, or a shelf full of games, or even a storage locker worth of games, that you were excited enough to buy (whether new or from the discount bin at your FLGS), or back on Kickstarter, or were gifted from a friend or family member, and while you are excited to have that game, and you have pored over its manual in loving detail, you will never, EVER get anyone else to play it with you. Pour one out for our fallen brethren, never played, relegated forever to sit and collect dust. Here are some of the games in my collection that I have paid good money for, but have resigned myself to the realization that I will never get to play them.
Planet Mercenary Role-Playing Game - based on the popular, long-running webcomic, Schlock Mercenary, Planet Mercenary (PM from here on out) is about running a mercenaries for hire corporation in a far future (31st century, per the human calendar), hard sci-fi universe. Do you want to play strange alien races or just plain humans, using high tech weapons and gadgets to kill strange alien races or just plain humans, and getting paid huge sums of money to do so? Well, everything but that last one can be found in PM, as CHAOS is the theme of this tabletop RPG, and you will find yourself failing more often than you are succeeding, but that frequent failure is built into the rules (and if you're familiar with the comic at all, the lore of the game universe), to the point where you will in combat often find yourself deciding on whether or not to invoke the Ablative Meatshield rule and kill a lower ranked NPC party member rather than lose your own PC... or decide not to, and start updating said lower ranked NPC to become your next PC as your current PC dies a gruesome death. And the accessories for this game! There are tokens (like bennies in Savage Worlds), a Mayhem deck and Mayhem dice, and a Game Chief screen made to look like a handbrain (think tablet computer) from the Schlock Mercenary universe, you really have to see the whole panoply in person to appreciate the attention to detail the creators paid to this game bringing it to life. And this is not a thin pamphlet like some of the Osprey games you see them selling, this is a serious, 352 page, nicely printed, hardbound book (if you get the physical copy, that is, they do offer it in digits as well), because the authors did not expect you to have read Schlock Mercenary to play the game, so they included as much backstory and setting information as they could cram into the book. No offense to Osprey, they make some very entertaining games (one of them is farther down this list), but their more popular ones tend to come in very thin, softbound books.
What is the likelihood of me getting my friends to play PM? Not very high, and that's even with me acknowledging that I, out of my group of friends, am probably the only one who has read Schlock Mercenary for any length of time (I read the comic almost from the start some 20 years ago) and I would have to be the one to run the game. I had to struggle to get enough folks interested in my Cyberpunk Red game to get it going and now will not be starting up a Savage Worlds game this year like I hoped I would (that free time and those players I had gathered to this point got grabbed by one of said players for a D&D 5e game we are starting up), so convincing either my Eberron group or my CPRed group to take a month off from either of those games, or even hold an extra session mid-month to play some PM, is pretty slim. I am going to keep trying, though, as I feel my CPRed group would be up for trying out something different.
Redshirts and Redshirts 2 Card Games - way back in the early days of the internet (late '90s, early '00s) a young gentleman in the United States Army began posting the things he was not allowed to do in said Army, things like answering questions on forms in hilarious ways (The Wages of Sin are not heaps and heaps of slightly smelly cash) or doing things in humorous ways in the operation of normal Army business (May not chew gum in formation unless I brought enough for everybody; The next day, may still not chew gum in formation even if I did bring enough for everybody). Eventually, the list grew to encompass 213 such "things" and he made a list, and named it after his nickname - The Skippy List. Yes, that is a link from the Internet Wayback Machine, because the site has been down the last couple of years and had not been updated since 2015. Sometime after leaving the Army and graduating from the SMU Guildhall program (game design is what they teach), Skippy made his first game, Redshirts (RS from here on out). If you are any type of geek, you immediately thought of Star Trek, and you'd be right (we'd also accept the book of the same name from John Scalzi, and while both got released at the same time, other than the gigantic coincidence, there is no ties between the two), this game is a parody of the original Star Trek always sending down a nobody in a red shirt and then killing them off. I know, you see the humor in it, too, right? And Skippy and the team at WeaselPants (I know, another archive from the Internet Wayback Machine, but what can you do?) even got David Riddick, creator and artist of the Legend of Bill webcomic, who draws humor scenes very well, to do all the art of the cards.
So what happened? This sounds like a slam dunk of a game - it's funny, got a great premise, and the art assets were perfect for the job. Unfortunatley, the premise of the game is the problem, to win a round of RS, you have to be the first to kill off your redshirts. Sadly, it's such a simple premise that once you get through the terrible instructions and figure out that is what you're supposed to do - put your redshirts in situations they are unsuited to handle, while at the same time giving your opponents' redshirts the means to overcome their dire situations - either you're the only one who has figured it out and you win too easily, or if multiple people figure it out, then the whole table becomes deadlocked. There is no replayability to the game at all, and after you've laughed at all the in-jokes once, the game is stale and boring. Which is why the game and WeaselPants folded. Even a 2nd edition that was successfully Kickstarted after the 1st one funded and shipped (and yes, I backed both editions and the one expansion) still did not add enough complexity to the game to fix the lack of replay value. And also why I will never play it with my friends. It still sits on my board game shelf, and I pull it out to show folks every once in a while, but it will never be played.
So many failed Kickstarters (more to come!) did I ever back a successful Kickstarter that I have played and gotten some use out of? Yes, as a matter of fact there is - from the creative big brains at Weta Workshop (yes, the one that did special effects for The Lord of the Rings movies, the recent popular ones) they made a board game set in a sci-fi future that is one part dystopic cyberpunk, "the whole world is run by corporations!", and one part big stompy robots gaining dominance through heavy weapons and placing advertising on buildings. The game is called Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters (GKR for short), and the game, unlike the last one, is fun. There are multiple ways to win, lots of tactics you can employ, and all the pieces you get in the set are cool looking and very tongue-in-cheek funny at the same time. Why the long name? I get the feeling they had an inkling to expand it beyond the first game, but ran out of ideas before they could make game two, as they made some expansions for the first game almost half a decade back and nothing since. In fact, if GKR looks cool to you, now is the time to pick it up, Weta is trying to sell off their last copies and they're half of what I paid in the Kickstarter and a third of what the normal price has been. Get all the expansions and add-ons, too, as I think once they're gone, they'll be impossible to find. Do I play this game frequently? Not really, as it takes a long time to set up and a long time to play, there are other standbys in my collection that are shorter and easier and just as fun, so they get more attention. But still, I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a big, stompy robot combat game. Why did this succeed where Redshirts failed? Weta artists designed the minis and the art, and the humor on the cards, but they hired a professional game maker (who knew this was a profession? "what do you do for a living?" "I make board and card games" "how do I kill you and take over your life?" "if you kill me, I will only return stronger than before!") who had made successful board games many times before and he made sure the game was fun and had the right amount of complexity to it.
Gaslands Tabletop Wargame - I told you before I would get to an Osprey "pamphlet" game, and here we are. Gaslands is a simple game of post-apocalyptic vehicular combat (think the movies Mad Max: Fury Road or Death Race, but more like a competition as seen in Death Race than a survivalist piece as seen in any of the Mad Max films) that uses Hot Wheels/Matchbox scale cars for the base models. This is less a game that is about selling customers screamingly expensive, bespoke armies to make wads of cash for the makers, but about having fun with your friends in a cheap and inexpensive way, with as many materials as you probably already have in your house. Got some Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars kicking around from your childhood or in your child's/children's toybox(es)? You're already halfway to having most of what you need for this game. And if you don't have any cars floating around your house, they're basically a dollar new at the store, or you can get a bunch of them from Goodwill for even cheaper (and the more beat up they are, the better). Now, admittedly, this is not a terribly deep game, full of lore and backstory, and there is little to do with the setting they have established outside of the car game itself, but that is not its purpose, it was meant to be a low cost, low time sink, beer and pretzels game that you and your friends distract yourselves with in between your more serious games. The only other big downside to the game is that, except for the books, Osprey makes and sells NOTHING for this game, not fancy dice, not the movement templates you have to have to play, not even weapons or other upgrades for the cars, like tires and engines and guns, so many guns. You have to either make it yourself (3d print hobbyists LOVE this game as almost everything can be 3d printed for it) or buy it from an online seller. And no, I still can't interest any of my gaming friends to come over, make up a bunch of cars, and play some games of Gaslands. Before I move on to the next game, I will say that if this game sounds interesting to you, Osprey has released an updated version of the Gaslands rules, called Gaslands: Refuelled, and I suggest you get this newer version instead. It's still super affordable (less than $20 for the book) and it has all the extra stuff Osprey has released for the game since the original's release, like war rigs (think the semi-truck they use in The Road Warrior to smuggle out the gas from the refinery) and zombie squishing races. Now I want to print up a bunch of random weapons and car accessories, a couple sets of templates, and some dice and put out an invite to see who's interested.
DIE the Role-Playing Game - here is another game I backed on Kickstarter, and just like PM, DIE is also based on a comic of the same name, physical this time instead of being a webcomic. If you're not familiar with the story, DIE is about 6 teenagers who went to a friend's house to play a RPG, got sucked into that RPG world, and then came back to the real world... only to then go back to the RPG world some years later to take care of some unresolved issues from the first go-round. This is a classic kind of story, as seen in the movie Tron, the book Quag Keep, and the recently popular anime/manga genre known as isekai. Side note, if you've never read Quag Keep, go do it, it's some fascinating lore from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, as the author, Andre Norton, was introduced to D&D by Gary Gygax himself and she wrote this book based on that introduction. Anyway, back to DIE - the game has so recently been funded that, as I am typing this, I have received the pdf of the game, but not the physical copy of it yet. I could use that pdf to try to get a game going, or even do a one shot, but with all the problems I have had trying to get a Savage Worlds game going, much less PM, that I doubt I'll ever get to play/run DIE. Plus, I'm also a little hesitant as I don't know if I would do a DIE game/campaign justice, as this is not your normal hack 'n' slash dungeon delve, oh no, this is a fancy, thinking person's type of game, one that deals with feelings and interpersonal relationships, and while I'm a decent enough DM for 5e and GM for CPRed, I worry that I'm not good enough for a story as high of a caliber as the original comic and this game both have. But I still backed it, because I believe in voting with my money and that people who make awesome things outside of the normal channels (the comic was not published by Marvel or DC, and the game does not use WotC's OGL d20 system) should get my business... when I can afford it.
Again, another game destined to gather dust, as I've been unable to get my RPG-playing, comics-interested friends in reading the comic book itself, I doubt I'll get them interested in such a cerebral undertaking as playing this game. I'm far more likely to get a group around either a more action packed game (my failed Savage Worlds experiment, or PM above) or something more traditional (basically, even with the WotC OGL kerfuffle I still couldn't get anyone interested in Savage Worlds, while half the D&D players across the globe, and even locally, were swearing off D&D in response... I'm beginning to think it's me) (or that gamers are just like everyone else on the planet who proclaim they are bored and want to try something new, but in reality want just more of the same old, same old; it's why I gave up waiting for friends and coworkers to go play paintball with, and simply went to the field to play with whoever else showed up), and DIE, as cool as it is, just isn't either of those things.
Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack and Intercept Orbit, LEGO based tabletop wargame - yep, another Kickstarter I backed years ago and have still only played a game or two of. This one, like several other games on here, is still barely alive, in that you can still buy the books (or download them for free, Intercept Orbit here), but beyond that, there's not much of a community backing it and the creative team behind the games have moved on to different projects. The idea behind MF0: Rapid Attack is big stompy mech combat, but everything from the robots to the terrain is made out of LEGO bricks, and you pull pieces off to represent damage. So your mech hides from mine behind a wall, and I shoot the wall up, taking off so many bricks with each hit, and when the wall is gone, that's it, I start hitting your mech. Each hit on your mech destroys a system (pardon me if I get this wrong, it's been a long time since I've looked at the rules) and you remove the bricks that represent that system from your mech, be they shields or weapons or movement thrusters. And since it's all based on LEGO bricks, and LEGO lost the proprietary lock on their dimensions a while ago so now EVERYONE'S building bricks are the same dimensions, you can use practically everyone's building bricks to make any mech you can dream up. How inventive can you get? Check out this Flickr group that is nothing but MF0 designs. The other game in the pair, MF0: Intercept Orbit, is the space combat portion of the hard sci-fi universe that the game resides in. Same idea, though, make LEGO spaceships and battle each other. These games, like Gaslands, are very "light" games, only three factions in the setting with very little backstory on any of them, and then all the rules you need to play, plus some plans to make some mechs/spaceships.
Once again, can't interest anyone in playing either game, even if they are super cheap (both games are FREE to download, and I know if you're reading this, you probably have a bucket of LEGOs or other compatible bricks gathering dust in your house) and easy to pickup the rules to play. There is one problem with these two, however, but it's not terribly obvious here as it is in other games, but this is where I personally started seeing this trend in the games industry - Wokeness. Do the creators of MF0 pray to the Woke egregore that has been building over the last decade on social media? Yes, yes they do, but not as bad as some others I've seen or even talked about on this very blog. How bad is it in the industry today? I saw mention of a new RPG that had come out in the past year and noticed they had a free version of their rules for download, just a taste of the rules and backstory to give you a demo to entice you back to purchase the full game. I download it, and then after reading the intro of the whole book, where they talk about the creative team's race, gender, and sexuality, virtue signaling their Wokeness far and wide by decrying the horrible things they depict in a work of fiction, which is where I deleted the file and am no longer intrigued by the game. No really, I came here to play a game, not acknowledge your virtue signaling and honestly, as long as you're not breaking the law, I could care less about any of that stuff. You want equality, there it is - I am apathetic to ANYONE'S race, creed, gender, sexuality, or tendency to pee standing up, sitting down, or laying on your side, just so long as you can be a productive member of society and do well at whatever job you have. When I get into a game of any type, I don't want to be preached at about how awful a person I am, I came to play a game, please spend your time writing what I need to play your game in the book and leave out your Woke screed. And let's be honest, if you didn't have some upsetting things in your RPG, it wouldn't be interesting enough for anyone to want to play, as no one brags about how they planted a community garden in Friends & Feelings, they talk about how they committed some intransigencies against the Geneva Convention on their way to snuffing out the bad guy. Sadly, MF0 suffers from this a bit, here is an example from their Creative Commons license, talking about creating your own setting to use their combat rules - "Design your setting in such a way that the signature elements of feudal, authoritarian, totalitarian, communist, corporate/anarcho-capitalist, or democidal political structures that are not true, workable, or morally acceptable in the real world are equally untrue, unworkable, and unacceptable in your setting." Um, I hate to say this, but there are completely morally corrupt regimes (morally corrupt by our standards in the US as well as elsewhere, but not everywhere, in the world) that have been THRIVING for decades and still going. So why can't I include them in my new setting, just because you don't like them? You really don't know how conflict in fiction really works, do you? Anyway, trust me when I say I interacted with the major players in the creative team on social media (this game came out when Google Plus was still a thing, and the MF0 team and fans were big on that platform) and eventually blocked them all for being overly Woke, raging assholes. Too bad, they made a very fun game.
That is my collection. I'm sure I've had other games that were so bad that they were merely unremarkable or I blocked them from my memory so I wouldn't inflict that hurt on myself again. I seem to remember a friend bringing out some card game that was about castle walls, but you put your troops (swordsmen, spearmen, archers) in front of the walls to protect the walls from getting destroyed, which is where I gave up playing because that makes no sense. And I have a ton of computer games that I've purchased that I haven't played yet, but I have to finish typing this and post it to the internet at some point before the heat death of the universe. What about you folks, what games do you have in your collection that you'll probably never get around to playing?
