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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’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.
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.
Not to be confused with the Labour MP of similar name, Jack Straws is a classic old game of the kind that I’m sure are still available, but yet you never seem to see in the shops any more.
You know how sometimes there were certain toys which no matter how many times you added them to your Christmas List, Father Christmas (he was still Father Christmas when I was a kid, not Santa Claus as he seems to be called these days) never seemed to bring them?
One of things you did as a kid when Christmas was just around the corner was to start making a list of things you wanted Father Christmas to bring you (I try to resist the urge to call him Santa Claus. It was always Father Christmas when I was little). Invariably of course you didn’t get everything on that list, but you might have got a few things that weren’t on your list.
It’s probably fair to say that the 1970’s and 1980’s was the era when role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons were at their most popular. This popularity saw certain films and comic books get their own role playing game, and Ghostbusters was one such film that the made the transition from celluloid to statistics.
Downfall was one of those games that I always wanted, but no matter how much I hinted or wrote it on my Christmas list Santa somehow failed to bring me my own copy. Luckily a cousin of mine did get one for Christmas one year, so I did get to play it, but I liked it so much that just made me want my own one all the more.
