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There are some board games that everybody must have played, if not owned, at some point in their lives, and Operation is one such game.
The workings of the game are derived from one of those steady hand testing games, where you have to pass a loop of wire around another bent piece of wire without the two touching, which will complete a circuit and make a buzzer sound.
Operation took this concept and changed the wire loop into a pair of tweezers and the bent wire into little holes lined with metal. The playing board had a picture of man being operated on, and the little holes were dotted about the body of the man. Each hole had a little plastic bone (more on those in a moment) which the player had to remove with the tweezers. If the tweezers came into contact with the side of the hole they caused both a buzzer to sound and a red light to come on, which was strategically placed to be the man’s nose.
The little plastic bones all had humourous (or should that be humerus?) names such as Funny Bone, Broken Heart and Spare Ribs. In actual fact, one of the bones wasn’t made of plastic, it was instead a rubber band which stretched between the ankle and the knee, and it was called The Ankle Bone Connected To The Knee Bone.
The game also came with a set of cards and some money, and this was supposed to guide how the game was actually played, but personally I just played it by having all the players take turns at trying to remove a piece of their own choosing.
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I shied away from using the brand name of this particular toy as the heading for this post, simply because I wasn’t 100% sure I had the name right, but I’m pretty sure there used to be a range of these craft kits known as Plastercasts.
The 
I’ve mentioned various toys in the past on this site which were on my Christmas list but which the red suited one failed to bring, but today’s post is about one request which did turn up in my stocking come Christmas Day morning.
There were (and still are) a number of fun practical jokes you can get, such as 
Without 
Hungry Hungry Hippos was a madcap board game for up to four players which, to be honest, relied more on luck than skill in order to win. Four plastic hippopotamuses lined the edges of a plastic playing board, and when you pressed a little switch on the back of the hippo it’s head shot forward and upwards before returning, which made it look like it was chomping away on some food.
