Now looky here folks. I’m a Euro gamer through and through. That means I want my tracks long, my board beige, and all dice thrown into a woodchipper and destroyed beyond repair. I want my rondels sliced plentifully, my tabelaus unassailable, and my point salads delicious as f*ck with a variety of options. F*ck your random chance. If I lose a game, it’s cause I spent my wood and stone like a g*d d*mn idiot.
But holy SH*T do I love any chaos in a game that induces gut-busting laughter. I’m only on this planet for … what, maybe 40 more years? Let’s make them the best d*mn years of my life. Strategy may be fulfilling, but joy with friends is the destiny I desire.
The chaos I’m talking about is NOT the chaos found in Quacks of Quedlinburg, where you just draw random sh*t from a bag. That garbage ain’t what I’m thinking. I’m talking about moments of random failure so grand you p*ss yourself laughing. I want to watch well-laid plans that took 90 seconds to calculate shattered into pieces at the drop of a hat because a die roll or an opponent took issue with me. The following games are all chaos, all hilarious, and serve up wild punishments that are just plain bananas.
Galaxy Trucker
Construction contracts often go to the company that will do the job for the cheapest price. Now imagine if the contract winner had no morals and kneecapped any OSHA inspectors eyeing up their distatrous spaceship model. That’s Galaxy Trucker. Some people love this game, others roam this planet with massive brain injuries. You’re either one or the other. In Galaxy Trucker, you build a ship in realtime with one hand tied behind your back (Not literally of course, but it might as well be). You wanna be the fastest and you wanna have enough guns, engines, crew, and cargo holds to survive the unknown. But none of this is done with blueprints – we ain’t rocket scientists. We just fire the rockets.
Once your sh*tty albatross is fully glued together, it’s off on its simultaneously final frontier AND only frontier. Cause that b*tch ain’t making back. All players sit with dumb smiles on their faces as space cards from a small deck are flipped over. Each player, one at a time, deals with the flipped card. If it’s open space, I hope you have enough engines! Is it resources? Then you better have the cargo spots! Oh sh*t aliens! Do you have enough guns to kill them? Asteroids! OHMYGOD my ship’s been cut in half!
Watching each player suffer through the evil aliens and wild asteroids is what we love about Galaxy Trucker. Your ship may be ripped to shreds, engineless, and pretty much empty after Alien Bob and Alien Steve took Human Bob and Human Steve. But if you survive through that deck in ANY condition, you get rewards. And then you wildly build another BIGGER ship and drive through another deck. It’s a fricken hoot.
Thunder Road: Vendetta
When a game causes a competitive, rational, and decent human to abandon the win in order to RAM THAT F*CK*NG JERK OVER THERE, it’s bedlam in a box. This game turns Eurogamers into wacky inflatable arm flailing tubemen. They lose all sense of mechanics in order to BE Mad Max. Thunder Road: Vendetta comes in a box-shape that p*ss*s me off, has sh*tty hollow cars, and offers no asymmetry without expansions. And yet, the chance to ram another player and send them into oblivion is, apparently, ALL I’VE EVER WANTED!
It’s amazing how quickly you dissolve into a felon once you’ve rolled your 4 MOVEMENT DICE. That’s right, this game has roll-and-move. And you can’t even move “part” of your move – you have to move the full movement. Now why would a game designer and publisher in this decade add such a stupid mechanic to an already simple game? Cause it’s f*ck*ng fun as f*ck, that’s why. Anyways, that’s the entirety of this game – Roll dice, move one of your cars, ram other players for wild effects, and try to take the lead.
I do have one warning for you though. If you have any competitive edge in you, you will become a blood-thirsty problem for anyone within swinging range. This characteristic that takes hold of you is the same one from Arcadia Quest. Arcadia Quest is a dice chucker where you can attack either the enemy orcs OR the other players. Guess who gets to live in this scenario? The orcs. Cause I’d rather leap over the terrors slaughtering Arcadians so I can absolutely smash Tom upside the head for standing there like an *sshole. If you like Arcadia Quest, I very much assume you’ll like Thunder Raod: Vendetta. If not, that’s fine. Just don’t be surprised if you see my blue heli flying above you one day.
Robo Rally
Robo Rally is the classic family programming game about getting f*ck*ng hosed by robots playing bumper cars blindfolded. Each player has a hand of nine command cards (Unless they’ve eaten sh*t, then they have like 2). The players choose and line up 5 of them face-down (so only they know). The cards do things like move your robot forward, turn to the side, or back-up. You try to maneuver your robot so they end up on numerically rising flags in this non-linear race game. Once all players have placed their chosen 5 cards, all are flipped over and INTO THE FIFTH LEVEL OF HELL YOU GO!
You may have had a plan, but none of it matters since you could not consider the orders given of 6 other f*ck*ng robots gunning for the same spot. Literally gunning. Like they will shoot you in the butthole if you get in the way. And then they ram you. If a robot is moving forward, and you sit in front of them like rubber cone, I guess you get bonus unplanned movement you lucky f*ck! Once the action starts, there is no correcting your pending doom. But as long as you don’t get shot TOO MUCH and don’t excitedly rush off a cliff, you’ll spend the next round either salvaging what you got left, or enter the fray once more.
If you like chaos as I do, you will love the mechanics of this game. What you WON’T like, and what prevents me from playing this more, is the length. Each level (and you would ideally play multiple levels) is at least 2 hours long. I am not even sh*tt*ng you a little. Since NO ONE is in control of their fate as each robot hilariously rams each other, smacks into walls, and happily drives off cliffs, it takes LITERALLY FOREVER for one robot to reach the final flag. The base mechanics are great, but you will have to houserule the endgame condition so you don’t miss your toddler’s next four birthdays.
Camel Up
I talk about Camel Up like it’s my favorite child, but I promise you it’s not – no golden child of mine would suffer the verbal barbs I throw out when the dumb f*ck*ng blue camel rides my yellow camel to glory. I’M TAKING YOUR HEAD HOME WITH ME, YELLOW! However, all that shouting is pure love. In Camel Up, five camels race toward a finish line as their dice tumble out of a sweet looking pyramid. A camel will carry any and ALL other camels on top of itself, assisting their opponents in the most ridiculous way possible.
Though you can gamble on which camel you think will win the race, you will earn the majority of your money gambling on which camel will be leading at the end of each “leg.” I put quotations around the word leg since I don’t have the slightest f*ck*ng clue what the leg of a race even is. I don’t do Nascar. I’m also going to assume the average person doesn’t either, so I’ll sum up “legs” like such. Each time a die is rolled, the camel matching the die’s color moves that many pips. Once 5 of the 6 dice are rolled, the leg ends and we hand out coins based on who correctly guessed the leading camel. We put the dice back into that pyramid and now we’re onto another leg.
This incredibly simple concept throws spice into a very random betting game. The leading camel can be knocked into last place like karma sought vengeance, two colorless crazy camels run backwards (carrying others AWAY from the finish line), and all 7 camels can end up in a single stack (I know those odds sounds impossible, but dice mechanics can do some pretty weird sh*t). There is shouting, cheering, and boos that come deep within the soul when someone’s chosen one does not move for two whole rounds. Camel Up is chaotic, hilarious, and yet somehow, I promise you, there is strategy.
And if you’re the kind of parent that simultaneously wants to play a competitive game with your children while gambling away their college tuition, you couldn’t do better than Camel Up. It’s kid friendly and guaranteed to trigger your super-duper fun gambling addiction.