Excellent Thrift Find: King Oil

Dig through enough piles of antique mall and thrift store board game garbage, and once in a great while you'll unearth a shining gem. This weekend, with family in tow, I plowed through booth after booth of musty antiques and mildewy books, tossing aside valuables to see the few board games stashed among the over-priced treasures. And BINGO! I found an excellent game from the 1970s that brings back nostalgia for a lot of people, forgotten among some Little Orphan Annie dolls and Carpenters records.

King Oil is a Milton Bradley game that was only printed for one year in 1974, and then vanished from store shelves forever. The game has an intricate plastic board with a unique mechanism, and its adult gameplay  captured a lot of imaginations in an era when board games were shifting more and more to child's play. Here's the BGG description of the game:

"This MB game comes with a plastic "board". Its size is dictated by the three randomizing discs embedded in its base, which are used to generate a new playing area every time (there are 1,728 (12^3) different setups possible). You buy properties, drill for oil, link properties with pipelines so as to collect royalties and try to be the richest player. Event cards complicate matters. Drilling is resolved with a little rig whose plunger is pushed up if it doesn't go through the hidden disc; if it pushes through all three, the well is dry. Deeper holes cost more, of course. Pipelines can be bought once you have 4 producing oil wells on a property; they reach across that property's boundary to another player's property, and are used to siphon royalties from him every turn. This is a clever mechanic that accelerates bankruptcy and keeps total playing time within reasonable limits. Once all players but one are pushed into bankruptcy, the remaining one is the winner." (source)

Interesting, no?

King Oil has always been a bit scarce though. The short print run certainly didn't help, but also there's the small flaw that the disc-randomizing mechanism that is seated under the plastic board tends to break with even minor abuse, rendering the set virtually unplayable. Lucky for me, the set I found hidden under a copy of The Flying Nun and The Bionic Woman board games is in excellent shape. The mechanism is still working, and the hundreds of teeny-tiny plastic pieces are all accounted for. Even the box is looking great, with no split corners or major damage (aside from some minor shelf wear).

So basically, I was stoked to find a gem like this, and now I'm glad to return this to the pool of board gamers who will love and care for this game and give it a good home. Maybe buy it a pony and take it to the zoo.

If you know anyone who's feeling retro and wants to check out the listing where we've posted it for sale on BGG, here's the link: King Oil. Otherwise, please enjoy this little peek back in time at what cool board games used to look like.