I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum (March Madness, Day 25)

25 Which game has the sleekest, most modern engine?

Let's take a closer look at All Outta Bubblegum, since I haven't looked at it in a few years, and it's only one page long.

Each PC starts with eight sticks of bubblegum. All rolls are made with a d10. For non-ass-kicking activities, roll your bubblegum or lower. For ass-kicking activities, roll over your bubblegum. You may sacrifice a stick of bubblegum to automatically pass a non-ass-kicking activity. If you take damage, you lose a stick of bubblegum. When you're all out of bubblegum, you're unstoppable in combat, but completely useless for anything else. In this situation, if someone else succeeds on ass-kicking against you, they roll a d10, if it's a 10 you're knocked out. Non-combat situations may also confound you and lead to defeat.

That's fairly elegant, is it not?

The one time we played it, as I mentioned in a previous post, we had to come up with a suitable action genre to play in.  Zombies being popular these days, that was one of the first things we hit on.  Then, someone of course made the connection to the game's title to John Carpenter's "They Live" and suggested we play in that milieu.  Rowdy Roddy Piper starred in the movie, so someone suggested all our characters should be WWF wrestlers from the 80's.  Then we came full circle, with someone suggesting WWF wrestlers vs. zombies.   

Now, surely you could have a genre, milieu and adventures planned before hand with this game, but it is a true beer-and-pretzels sort of game, really.  There's no advancement mechanic, no "goal of play" other than to kick ass, and no rules for creating opponents/challenges.  Pretty much everything fits under the "not ass-kicking" category, or the "ass-kicking" category, determining your chance of success.  A clever GM could give opponents their own bubblegum, but there's not much point.  Pretty much everything rests on the players' side for rolling, so it's fairly easy to just wing the whole thing.  

At least, I managed to wing an entertaining, if overly silly, game while drinking beers in a dark bar!