Globbo

Sure enough, the first one was weird. Globbo is copyright 1983, which means that it turns 25 years old this year. That would make the game a classic if anybody still played it, which they probably don't. I wonder why that could be? Well, the premise of Globbo is that one player has a group of bratty insect-like children from an alien race, and the other player has a blobby robotic babysitter. The babysitter tries to kill all the kids, and the kids try to destroy the robotic babysitter.

I'll let that sink in for a minute.
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Yeah, kind of a weird premise, eh? I must say, however, that I really liked this game when I was in high school. I played it a lot. I liked it so much that I wrote a set of campaign rules and got them published in the late, lamented Vindicator fanzine. So, I found it in the basement and broke it out and played a solitaire game (because the odds of me getting any of my friends to play this with me now was probably close to nil). Let's just say that I didn't enjoy the game as much as I remember from high school. Mechanically, the game works fine. When kids are killed, they "blow up" into six different pieces, either blips (energy balls) or yeasts (blobs of matter), which can reform into new kids, or the blips can commit suicide to try to destroy pieces of the globbo. And the globbo is kind of scary because it bristles with weapons and grows every turn. This is important because the kids are trying to constantly bite or blow off parts of the globbo, in order to destroy its head. If the head is destroyed, the kids win. If the kids are all killed, the globbo wins.

The rulebook lets you know after about 5 seconds of reading that nothing in this game is serious in the slightest. In fact, whenever the rulebook mentions anything dying, you are encouraged to send cash donations to the author in memory of the dead game piece. Seriously. The whole thing is just strange. It was goofy fun when I was younger, but I found it to be just goofy. This is a game that still holds up as a basic competitive tool, but I just have better games to play today, so I don't know that I will every play this again.