Monday, May 18, 2009

A little boardgame called Rivets


As a teen I played most of the microgames put out by Metagaming in the late 70’s. Chitin, Ogre, and of course Melee and Wizard.

These games were touted as being playable during a school lunch break and damned if they weren’t right. I was by no means a great rules interpreter (those skills would not be hard-forged until I started running Champions in the 80’s), but these microgames were so easy. The rules were aimed towards fast and furious action. You moved your little chits on the hex map, and you attacked, either with a weapon or missile of some kind. There you had it.

I played Rivets, Ogre, and Chitin religiously, but Rivets got the most play of all.

Rather than turn me off, the slightly cartoony robots of the Rivets were strangely appealing to me. In some weird way I thought of little robot tanks with big eyes as being kind of scary.

Armed with various guns and the occasional melee weapon (I think it was the Bopper class tank that featured a huge can-opener as a weapon, along with its freaky robotic war cry of “Pop-A-Top!”) the little mini-tanks scooted around the post apocalyptic landscape, fighting and scavenging for their respective factory CPU.

Besides some fun little game sessions, Rivets also made it’s way into a couple of my campaigns of the 80’s. In my first homebrew game, based on The Road Warrior, I had players dealing with the robots from Rivets as fellow scavengers on the field. As long as you didn’t attack them, or pick up choice pieces of salvage, they would leave you alone. I also used them in a much more violent encounter in an early Gamma World game, which eventually saw the characters having to assault the Robot Factory CPU.

I may actually have my old copy of Rivets somewhere deep in one of my game boxes, but I really only thought of the game again this last weekend as I was coming up with encounters for my Mutant Future campaign I have planned. I thought that it would be a hell of a shame not to feature the little metal scavengers as warriors in one of those upcoming games.

And I may just have to throw that monster tank for Ogre at theme at some point as well…

6 comments:

  1. wow, someone else played Rivets too? awesome. my friend Rich intro'd me to it. he went on to become a military strategist/tactician or some such thing in the Army, w/ the Korean peninsula being his specialty. make what you will of that! we also played a lot of a similar game with "chits" called I.C.B.M. (it was the Reagan era after all)... no idea who made it or where to find it now. probably in really bad taste, but we were kids just playing out our fears maybe.

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  2. found it:
    http://www.care2.com/c2c/photos/view/203/987473769/Games/ICBM.jpg.html
    what kind of maniac writes and markets that to kids? lol

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  3. This was fun to read and remember. :D

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  4. Bulette: Damn, I didn't remember the name, but I totally remember the Uncle Sam hauling back to toss the nukes.

    We also played a good bit of Nuclear War. I hear that game is still getting played out there.

    Man, it was a different world back then, but believe it or not we are still talking about nuke worries. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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  5. I have still maintained some Ogre playing - it's so easy to introduce to newbies. Never did try Rivets...
    bummer. Must be really easy finding Microgames these days...

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  6. Ragno: If I recall correctly, we used to mix and match the microgames a bit. We'd pit Rivet robots against Ogres, and even against the bugs of Chitin.

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