RSS
One of the problems with boardgames is dice. They are one of the most important parts of any boardgame, as without them the game can’t really be played at all. At least if a counter is missing you could use a penny to replace it, but lose a die and it requires a trip to another boardgame to pinch one. The answer to boardgame enthusiasts everywhere was the invention of the Pop-O-Matic device.
The Pop-O-Matic device was a plastic dome with the required number of dice inside to play the game it came with. Being much larger than the average set of dice it was much harder to lose, and in fact was often moulded into the playing board itself. Under the dome was a small piece of slightly bent metal, on which the dice rested. Pressing the dome caused the metal sheet to flip the dice into the air, thus rolling them. Another advantage of this was that it also stopped people from cheating as you had no control over how the dice were thrown.
The pictured game is one called Trouble, which was pretty much an identical copy of the old classic Ludo just with the Pop-O-Matic device stuck into the middle of the board. It looks uncannily like a game called Frustration that I used to own, so I wonder if Trouble may have been the name it went by in the US. I believe this game dates back to the 1960’s or 1970’s or possibly even earlier. Certainly I remember the box lid featured some people playing the game with dress sense that could only have come from sometime around then.
My uncle had one of these when I was a child and I remember that I used to always love playing with it whenever we went to visit. As the name of the game suggests it is a single player game, and is one that is incredibly simple to learn but incredibly hard to complete. You start with a cross shaped arrangement of marbles, with the middle marble missing. You can then remove marbles from the board by jumping other marbles over them horizontally or vertically. To complete the game you should end up with a single marble left on the board, occupying the central space.
With the early 1980’s really ushering in the videogame, it wasn’t long before the traditional boardgame manufacturers began to worry about losing people to this new fangled technology. As it turns out it doesn’t seem like they had to worry, there’s room still for both forms of entertainment, but that didn’t stop MB Games being rather clever and converting a selection of much loved videogames into a boardgame equivalent.
Of all the boardgames to appear during the 1980’s, Trivial Pursuit has got to be the most enduring and best known. Everyone must surely have played it at some point, and therefore experienced the seemingly unending chase around the board to get your last wedge. The drawn out end game must surely be the games downfall, and the reason why when anybody suggests playing a game they are normally met with a series of groaned responses of the “Can’t we play something else” variety.
As a child I was always confused about the board game Mastermind. I didn’t see how it related to the BBC TV quiz show for eggheads, as it involved guessing codes rather than answering questions about general knowledge or your specialist subject. Of course, the reason is because the two versions of Mastermind were completely different entities, but I was convinced that they must have been the same just because there was a man sat in a chair on the box of the game, and Mastermind the quiz show is famous for the black chair in which the contestants sit whilst they are grilled.
I remember getting the game Don’t Upset Me for Christmas one year from my parents, and I’ll admit that when I first unwrapped the present I was a little disappointed. I had never heard of the game before, and the box that mine came in wasn’t quite as colourful as that shown here. However, you should never judge a game by it’s cover, as when I sat down later to play the game with my Dad and sister I soon realised it was a very good present after all, as it was a really fun game to play.
I only ever played I Vant To Bite Your Finger once. A friend of mine had it, and I remember playing it round his house one day and finding it quite fun. On the face of it the game was fairly standard, just being one of those games where you move a counter around a winding path on the board. What made the game special was the big plastic Dracula that came with it, which was actually capable of biting your finger!
The rules of Battleships are simple. The game is played on two square grids, one grid to keep track of your ships and if they’ve been hit, the other for you to try and work out the positions of your opponents ships. Each player takes it in turns to call out a grid square that they are going to fire a missile at. The other player then states whether that square is a hit or a miss. Each ship is a different number of squares in length, and in order for the ship to be destroyed a hit must be made against every square it occupies. The winner is the player who destroys all their opponents ships first.