The 9 Most Insane Board Games of All Time
We realize that advertising should be taken with a whole shaker of salt, especially when it comes to toys, where there's a long history of making products look better than they are (as multiple generations of Sea Monkeys owners can testify). These board game boxes, though, go beyond deceptive advertising and right into the realm of "See, this is why your industry collapsed."
After all, we would have never stopped playing if these games had lived up to the depiction on their boxes. Just look at ...
The Backbone
Just only for intelligent people who grammar like us.
What It Looks Like:
Ah, yeah! This may be the best thing, ever. You convince a lady friend to take off her clothes and lie down, then you paint the game board -- surely the paints are included -- on her back! Or, if you're a serial killer, like the guy on the box, you could use a dead hooker. To win, you ... oh, who cares? It's a naked woman! And paint!
What It Is:
Wait, are those ... nipples? We don't get it.
It's a damned geometry game. The goal is to place your pawns in each color row until you form a polygon ... and, we can't stress this enough ... not on a naked woman.
There isn't even any nude art anywhere on the game board, and the pieces don't have tiny boobs. The only way this game could be worse would be if you had to talk about your feelings while making polygons.
Here, take the ceremonial protractor and tell me about your father.
15 Love
"Given, he was playing against a corpse, and they had to go to a tie breaker, but still."
What It Looks Like:
A part-time tennis hustler and full-time sex-offender-registry member named Biggs Calderhead is running roughshod over the Eastern seaboard, separating unsuspecting tennis amateurs from their hard-earned cash and unsuspecting girls from their hard-earned innocence. And this fun-filled game shows you how to be just like him! Awesome?
What It Is:
Orange for his pedostache, yellow for that beer gut and white for that creepy leer. The green dice are amphetamines.
Yes, it's a board game for people who find tennis too thrilling to watch. Each player gets two dice, and the rolls determine what kind of shot you make. So, you roll dice, pretend to hit a lob, roll dice, pretend to hit a passing shot, and so on and so on until someone wins or you doze off. Not only does the concrete block mentioned on the cover never make an appearance, but it looks like there isn't even a net, for the love of God. Damn it, you've hustled us again, famous tennis hustler Biggs Calderhead!
Mixed Pickles
No chance in hell that those aren't Andy Richter's ancestors.
What It Looks Like:
Uh-oh! The family dog, Pickles, is on a tear! Nothing is safe from this rampaging little doggie and his appetite for destruction. You and up to three friends play as the family's insanely creepy, stone-faced children and try to tame this wild pup by beating the shit out of him with a boot. We won't tell PETA if you don't!
What It Is:
Oh, it's ... words.
It's a 19th century card game with three sentence fragments on each card. You mix them up, make silly sentences and hilarity ensues! How riotous do things get? Check out this potential sentence:
"I'm always in for hunting buffalo at a wedding."
You're just going to have to take our word for it, but we promise jokes like that absolutely killed back in 1890.
Morron Terror
Wait, is this the German equivalent to the Scary Movie franchise?
What It Looks Like:
The inhabitants of an orphanage face daily TERROR at the hands of an alcoholic, cross-dressing caretaker named Benedict MORRON. Players compete to see who can respond to a series of loudly slurred commands the fastest. Don't be last, or else you'll get locked in a closet and deprived of food, daylight and human interaction for six days!
What It Is:
Mostly naked child. Playing this online lands you in prison.
Freddy, who looks downright happy inside the box, needs to get dressed for the day. That's it. You follow the instructions on a cassette tape (the black thing in the middle of the box, kids), and the winner is whoever can put the clothing cards on Freddy in the right combination. So we were kind of correct, provided you remove anything remotely interesting we said in the previous description. Question: Does "terror" mean "boring" in German?
Narro
Those aren't bruises. They're eggs.
What It Looks Like:
Clowns would never hurt anybody, every kid knows that! But when a small town is overrun by impostor clowns intent on eating children in their sleep, you're the last line of defense against evil fakers that want to devour every soul in sight. But how can you tell the evil clowns from the non-evil clowns? Trick question, they're all evil. But killing the ones that have disgusting, pulsating purple orbs on their heads earns you extra points! Kill them all! For the sake of the children!
What It Is:
If you look at it through the special clown glasses, it tells you to kill your parents.
Fucking checkers. One player uses the round pieces, one the square pieces, and you capture the other player's pieces by jumping over them. Super original gameplay, Narro. They did stick outlines of clown heads on the pieces, but besides that, there doesn't even seem to be anything clown-themed about the game -- you just have to use your imagination to picture in your mind the clowns "jumping" their victims and sending their "souls" to "hell."
Fruchtchen!
Incredibly, this entry has nothing to do with the Nazis.
What It Looks Like:
Our fruits are tired of being juiced, and they aren't going to take it anymore! But there's one problem ... you're thirsty! Fight your way through hordes of marauding fruit revolutionaries and turn those malcontent treats into delicious juice drinks by draining them of their precious life blood. But beware of the Enraged Lemon! He's waiting around every corner, and he's dangerous. The first player to successfully turn that angry citrus into a delicious pitcher of lemonade wins!
What It Is:
You have to eat all of that.
You roll dice, which allows you to "harvest" the fruit cards. "Harvest" of course is just a fancy word for "pick up." You can also pass a dice roll that you don't want to another player. And, well, that's pretty much it. Which leaves us wondering: Why is the lemon on the box so very angry? It seems like a happy, smiling cartoon lemon would've sold the game just as well. What terrible fruit-related trauma happened in the illustrator's childhood to make him convinced that lemons are out to get us?
Not that he's wrong, mind you.
The Amusing Game of Kilkenny Cats
Do NOT turn the box over. It'll make you puke.
What It Looks Like:
The (real) story goes that during the Irish rebellion of 1798, mercenaries in Kilkenny tied two cats together for a little blood sport. When an officer looked like he was going to stop the fun, they cut off the cats' tails to let them escape and then told him that the cats had eaten each other down to the tail. So we can only assume that "The Amusing Game of Kilkenny Cats" lets players recreate this awful and anatomically impossible story with adorably dressed cats fighting to the death. Amusing, indeed!
What It Is:
Yes, we know there aren't going to be pistol-shooting cats in there, but come on.
It's Checkers meets Sorry! -- the players move their totally non-cat-looking pawns from one side to the other based on dice rolls. There's not even any fighting; if one player's piece lands on top of another, it's simply taken off the board.
With the elaborate pistols-at-dawn scenario on the box, you'd think they could at least have the players roll to see whose pawn gets removed, but apparently that took too much thinking about the rules. It's much easier to slap some cats in waistcoats on the cover, title it "An Amusing Game" and call it a day, which is exactly what they did.
We're guessing this was the poor kids' version, called "Wood and Some Pieces."
Grosse Walze
Well, that looks perfectly reasonab-- no. No, it doesn't.
What It Looks Like:
Die Grosse Walze ("The Big Barrel") is as happy as an inanimate object can possibly be, but behind that smile is a dark secret ... it's only happy when it's killing. And trust us, you don't want to see the barrel when it isn't happy.
If you're going to play it, you own up to the horror and LOOK AT THEIR FACES!
Use the barrel to crush as many civilians as possible before they can flee in terror and you'll keep the barrel happy and full with the blood of innocents.
What It Is:
You roll the die and move your pieces onto the track. If you become the owner of the "big barrel," you can move your opponents' meeples off the board. For those of you not geeky enough to have heard the term meeples: First, congratulations. Second, meeples are wooden or plastic figures that stand for human beings in games, especially German ones. Unfortunately, the "big barrel" is only a figure of speech; you don't really get to physically crush anything. Equally disappointing is that although the cover shows figures with expressive faces, the pawns are just colored wood.
If you want to drench the board in blood, you have to supply your own.
We realize that in 1929 Germany was on the brink of economic collapse, so there wasn't a lot of money to spend on anything fancy, but couldn't they have used some of the money spent on the elaborately deceptive box and put it toward a little bit of white paint to give the meeples some eyes?
Alles Paletti?!
"Good thing we thought to bottle up all of our shit."
What It Looks Like:
Little Tommy lives in an abusive home where he is buried up to the knees in dirt and/or feces while his evil parents pour bottles of beer and/or acid on his head. Roll the dice to try to rescue Tommy from his home while avoiding the attacks from his psychotic parents. Get there too late, and you'll find nothing but Tommy's acid-scarred bones in a shallow grave.
What It Is:
Ninety percent of that is just variations of the word "testicles."
The game is designed to improve parent-child communication, which all but guarantees a horrible time for the entire family. The cards feature different moral situations that parents can discuss with their kids to find out how they would react if they were placed in said situations. In other words, it's a game designed to teach kids how to lie.
For more questionable design choices, check out Lost In Translation: 20 Baffling Foreign Movie Posters and The 19 Most Hilariously Failed Attempts at Sexy Album Covers.
