Town Dump might just be the single most obscure board game I've featured on this blog thus far, and that includes "Across The Board: A Horse Racing Game", so that says something.
Can I make an admission? I'm a sucker for dumpster diving. Growing up, my best friend's mom managed a series of apartment complexes, and because of that, he and I had the absolute run of the mill of the places, getting into unused apartments to film early short films and, of course, going dumpster diving. It was just a fantastically good time, and even in 2014 when I lived in Santa Cruz in a complex populated mostly by college students, I dumpster dove all the time, because the thing about college kids is they throw a lot of things away when they move home after college ends, and so you find a lot of excellent stuff for zero dollars. Once, my friend and I discovered a virtually new acoustic guitar in one of the dumpsters at his apartment complex, and you wouldn't believe some of the furniture I managed to get for that Santa Cruz apartment just from college kids leaving it behind.
So yeah, this board game is sort of tailor made for me, because I love trash. But let it be known that I only love trash that can be utilized. I'm not a hoarder by any means. I hate filth and actual garbage, but I love finding things that were thrown away that can still be used for years to come, like furniture and musical instruments. Town Dump, a board game I've never even heard of before today (so we're learning about it for the first time together!) is all about trash...the dump, to be precise!
Released by Milton-Bradley, there's actually very little information regarding the people who made this game a reality, including no art director and no designer information. And frankly, not to bemoan anyone's work, there's not really much to discuss here, because aside from the concept itself of creating a board game based around a town dump...there's not much to admire, visually. The board is fairly plain, sad to say, as it's covered in pieces of plastic debris jumbled into the center, and the coolest aspect is, obviously, the motorized bulldozer, likely one of the first board games with a motorized piece, I'm willing to bet, but don't quote me on that. I will admit, however, that it's a fairly unique design in the sense that the board is laid inside of the bottom of the box it comes in, in order to truly emulate the unleveled ground of a dump site, and that's pretty darn cool. I don't think I've ever really seen anything like that before.
But overall the game has the art direction that an actual town dump would have. Nothing is very visually appealing, and all the plastic pieces are one solid color (because people were cheap back then) and even the bulldozer barely registers as a bulldozer at first glance. The board - outside the debris in the center that you're meant to attempt to clear - is completely flat, with all the other "junk" simply drown onto the board itself, which is just boring. You could've at least thrown in an actual used tire mountain for us, guys. Come on, we're not asking for much, just a little bit of design consistency is all. But I digress. Clearly Town Dump wasn't one of Milton-Bradley's big pushes, as evidenced by the fact that I found out about it in a an article literally titled "14 Justifiably Forgotten Milton-Bradley Board Games", coupled with the fact that, as I said at the start, there's virtually no identifying information in regards to the people who made this thing a reality outside of the publisher proper.
But that doesn't mean it deserves to go completely unrecognized.
I'm nothing if not a sucker for the underdog, for the lost and the forgotten. That's why I do these blogs, because whether it's a VHS box with strange art, a weird toy nobody's ever hard of or a fantastic mask that deserves to be seen, I'm a defender of art in all its forms. I think they all deserve to be seen, even if some are less interesting than others, solely because someone went out of their way to create it, and that time deserves to be recognized. Town Dump might've ended up squarely in the town dump, more or less, but it deserves to be remembered simply because it existed, a defiant act in and of itself.
Town Dump is such a forgotten relic that the only pictures anyone has of it all come from the same source, Board Game Geeks, which tells you something. I commend their archival efforts, however, because it seems we're in the same line of work when it comes to appreciating the underappreciated, whether it seems like it deserves to be appreciated or not.
It's no Fireball Island, or to a lesser extent, Forbidden Bridge, but it's a title that Milton-Bradley at least thought deserved to be made, for one reason or another. Sure the box art is generic (just some little girl smiling at a board game about trash upheaval) and sure the board design itself, and all its implements are relatively bland, but I think it's great that even something such as a Town Dump can be the setting for a board game. And that's sort of the neat thing about board games, isn't it? The possibilities are endless. Settings can be anywhere, anything, and concept can range from the mundane to the silly to the outright abstract. They're truly a form of art unlike anything else, especially because often people will take a chance on them when nobody else would had they been in any other medium.
Don't get me wrong, odd appreciation aside I can be unbiased; Town Dump is ugly as sin. There's nothing remotely visually appealing about it, and it in fact looks about as bad as the garbage it's based on. The puke greens and the snot yellows and the goofy fucking font on the front of the box with that bizarre image of a small girl simply smiling at the game she's set up, clearly only setting it up to admire it and not actually play it because who in their right mind would play this with her? There's not even another kid on the box! She's the only one willing to be odd enough to enjoy this thing, good for her, but still. It's likely the ugliest board game I've covered in this blogs entirety, but hey, that's an accomplishment in and of itself, right?
Listen, anyone can talk about the heavy hitters. It's not hard to compile a list of the most popular board games, the most disliked board games, or even relatively obscure board games, but it takes a true fan of the medium to go out of their way to find things like Town Dump and bring them to you, the ever hungry public, because she believes that you need to know about it, for better or worse.
I'm just doing gods work, is all.
Town Dump is ugly, it's ridiculous, it defies explanation, and yet it exists, and I think that's beautiful. I also think that's a fairly accurate assessment for life itself, but that's a discussion for another day. This brown doodoo colored board and its gaudy overcolored pieces all come together to create a glorious cacophony of visual bleach that you won't soon forget, and for that, we must admire it, because anything that goes out of its way to be that ugly, that repulsive, that creatively bankrupt, deserves to be acknowledged for existing, even if it did eventually wind up in the very same place it was meant to portray.
God bless Town Dump, and god bless Milton-Bradley for going the extra mile and showing kids that, yes, playing in garbage is fun!
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