Tektolio is a strange game from sggc Oktabo. Actually, their entire web site is rather strange. It’s a little hard to figure out exactly how the game plays.

The description:

Players explore the strange island Villa of Tektolio where you have become stranded. You find all sorts of junk. You’ll encounter some uniquely odd characters and be plunged into some bizarre and possibly life-threatening situations . You have to use the items you find to build Kontraptions that will remedy the situations. The first player to reach 500 points wins the game and may leave the island. . . if the other players allow it. . . .

And something to do with cards and dice. That’s just the start …

How the designer came up with game:
One night I am in a dream: I am wandering through a building. Sometimes I am alone, sometimes with assorted friends and relatives. Each time I or we go somewhere, things are startlingly different and bizarre: in someone’s garage, replete with a mounted deer head, cops break in on a bust; from a theatre rehearsal studio I sense I’ve been in before, I go outside into bright daylight to see that the building is an old (now-demolished) tobacco barn near the house where I grew up; on a warehouse loading dock, there is a raid by leather-clad gang members; outside, in twinkling twilight, the building is the church I attended in my formative years, and paramedics come racing in to whisk away an unidentified person…. I awaken, a bit shaken, thinking, “Hm… that was weird.”

From there you can go to the playtesting stories, such as:

Carl, an aeronautics engineer, was only momentarily fazed when a Room Event had him dressed in a sequined evening gown and spike heels. He was falling into a piranha pond, and figured by scrawling some complex mathematical problems on his slate, those smart little de-fleshing engineers would be too engrossed to attack him. Meanwhile, he kicked off those heels and swam to safety.

And end with stories of the volunteer work they did to help out on September 11 in downtown Manhattan.