We’ve all got ’em. That game you bought that looked cool, or was a licensed franchise you like on TV or whatever, or you used to play and just don’t anymore, or everyone just wants to play D&D… The orphan taking up room on your shelf that you’re not going to play, but keep because — just maybe — one day it’ll happen.

I’ve got a bunch of these. Sometimes I buy them to steal ideas, or the art s pretty to look at, or I liked other products with the same mechanics –either way, there’s a host of these things sitting waiting to entertain my gaming group (or not…they might suck.)

Some are new and we just haven’t gotten to it. The obvious one here is The One Ring — the new Free League version. I bought it because the wife is a Tolkein nut but we just haven’t gotten to it. There’s settings for D&D: Odyssey of the Dragonlords, or Age of Antiquity — a Rome-based campaign that, had it published on time, would have been useful when I was running a Rome-based D&D game. There’s Forbidden Lands, another Free League game. I bought it to possibly play a more realistic and brutal version of D&D. Blacksad is still waiting for its test run. I never got a chance to run Firefly, and honestly, I bought it to have material for the original MWP Serenity game; I do not like the Fate-ified version of Cortex that has been their go-to since the Leverage game came out. There’s the perennial outcast — Jovian Chronicles, a rich and interesting anime-inspired hard sci-fi setting. The mechanics are awful. Similarly, I was really pumped for Altered Carbon. I liked the show (haven’t read the books) and the initial art, etc. looked promising. It’s a hot mess — mostly due to it’s use of symbols for everything that makes the rule book all but unreadable. There’s Capers — a superheroes meets Prohibition America. Look interesting; haven’t gotten to it yet. Another old one — Aces & Eights, a Western RPG that has some weird mechanics to it. There’s a host of interesting material that I’ve stolen for other Victorian-period games, but the game itself looks like a hot mess. But again — fantastic background material.

So what have you got on the shelf you haven’t played and why?