Most obscure Tabletop Game you've played?

To expand on the title a bit: What's the least mainstream, most unpublicised, obscure, limited run, kickstarter-ed, strange, broken, bizarre, or localized Tabletop Game you've played?

Anything goes. Even Latvian History Monopoly (if such a thing exists).

Prompt-y question: did you like it? Would you play it again? WHERE CAN I GET IT?!?!?

Personally, it was Betrayal at House on the Hill. Very neat, spooky, and a fascinating set of scenarios reminiscent (in a good way!) of the multiple endings in the board game Clue.

Bliss Stage: Interim Stage...

That did NOT end well...

Otherwise, technically fewer than twelve people (as of right now) have played the system I published. But that doesn't really count for a number of reasons.

Giving it further thought, I should probably explain Bliss Stage. It's a game that works best when you have at least three couples who know each other very well and one person not in a relationship who knows everyone TOO well.

You basically take turns as a couple attempting to complete an objective, but every time you screw up everyone else at the table is allowed to throw in ideas to make things harder. They are encouraged to use real life conflicts between people to try and disrupt the couple currently playing.

This game ends marriages... Nice fireworks show for the one single guy playing the Authority Figure. But I would never put anyone through that ever again.

You actually can't "win," because you have a stat called Bliss, that when it hits 108, your character dies, goes catatonic, or if they are really, really lucky, just burn out and might become an Authority Figure.

edited 25th Nov '15 3:21:29 PM by AETHDH

Most obscure tabletop games I have played are Buck: Legacy and Twilight Sparkle's Secret Shipfic Folder.

The first one feels like a co-op Munchkin with a focus on equipment over levels. The second one is about trying to ship certain characters based on the requests of Twilight Sparkle (she is a shipfic writer in this tabletop game). The second one has a small Tropes page on this site while the first doesn't

• Maelstrom
• Monster Horrorshow
• The FASA Doctor Who game. Never fight cybermen with a low crit chance.

edited 26th Nov '15 1:16:18 PM by Michael

Let's see... a friend of mine produced a game via Kickstarter called Fealty that I might have broken a little.

I was involved with the playtesting of a locally-produced game called Collateral Damage that was a send-up of comedic action anime - back when I did the playtest, they had all the characters actually have the names of various harem characters.

I have to admit, I'm not so sure what counts beyond those as obscure... if Betrayal at the House on the Hill counts as obscure to folks, I think there's a large portion of games I've liked - Arkham Horror, Talisman, 7 Wonders - that could potentially also count.

Unwritten.

It's also the only tabletop RPG I've played.

Furry Pirates. Yes, that's really a published RPG book.

Terra Invicta. Basically, XCOM with serial numbers filed off.

It's gonna get published in Polish one day, as I know the designer, and I'm considering bouncing on him until he puts my character in the rulebook art somehow. Bishie hair, cybernetic right arm and nerdy t-shirt are pretty iconic.

Monster of the Week. Probably one of the most underappreciated games in the Powered By The Apocalypse engine, IMO. It's about emulating Monster of the Week style TV shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. I think it has some of the most fun rules of any PBTA game, which makes it even worse that it's so obscure.

I had a GM run the Official Street Fighter Tabletop RPG for us when I was a teenager. It was pretty crap, IIRC. In Nomine is relatively little known too, I've played that a lot.

Hmm. What counts as "obscure"?

I ran a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game set in the old west about 10 years ago. It was pretty fun.

Star Frontiers is pretty obscure these days, but I played and ran it a lot back in the day. I had a binder full of characters that I just got rid of with the last move. I ran their 2010 movie tie-in module once for my group.

Likewise I played and ran in the FASA Star Trek all through Jr. High - that's pretty obscure today too. We tried FASA's Doctor Who once or twice but never got a real game going.

Does GURPS: Uplift count as obscure? I played a dolphin in that one. How about GURPS: Riverworld? I ran a few sessions of that one too, but it didn't end up going anywhere much.

I've been running a game of Cubicle 7's The One Ring for my weekly group for just over a year now, but I'm not sure if that counts as "obscure".

I've got several games that are perhaps more obscure (TSR's Buck Rogers, Leading Edge's Aliens, Timelord - the one-book Doctor Who RPG, the Twilight Imperium RPG - it's awful, Paranoia 5th Edition which is a literal Un Product), but haven't actually run or played in them.

My friend had a weird card game called "Lunch Money". The synopsis is that you are playing as elementary school girl bullies fighting to the death over lunch money, notably with baseball bats and barbed wire.

Is Talisman considered obscure? I've only played it a couple times and don't know how uncommon it is, but it is really fun.

I once made a Tabletop RPG and played that. It wasn't very good, to be honest, but you don't get any more obscure than that.

I think homebrew should be excluded. We all have made some homebrew stuff at some point, after all.

One of my favorite RPGs uses a homebrew setting and a homebrew system originally partially based on Star Wars d6, but which has since grown to be its own beast.

edited 24th May '16 10:06:19 PM by Medinoc

Well, I haven't played it, but I've got a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard that I'd like to give a spin.

The Street Fighter RPG, which unlike the other guy's opinion, I thought was pretty sound. Aside from the horrible artwork in the book.

The most obscure published RPG I played was probably Pokéthulhu, which showed how bad a GM I was at the time. I'm still not that good a GM actually, but I like to think that's still an improvement over before.

edited 1st Jun '16 1:43:16 AM by Medinoc

Oh, probably the most obscure I've played, although I think it got less obscure as time went on, is the game Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot, the first game I know of running the Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ, which also describes character creation) system. It's a hell of a pickup "beer and pretzels" style game, especially because you can assign stats to anything the GM says is fair game. My favorite was when I ran it for a bachelor party.

Me: So, you just make up a skill name and assign a bonus to what you do with it, with said bonus being divisible by two.
Groom-to-be: Okay, what if I want a skill that lets me do John Woo shit?
Me: Just tell me what bonus you're going to put into Do John Woo Shit.

For the record, he put in a +4, and he was doing Gun Fu with flintlock pistols in the middle of a shopping mall. It was glorious.