Subbuteo was invented by a chap named Peter Adolph. He initially placed adverts in The Boy’s Own back in 1946 for the game, but it wasn’t until the following year that final sets were sent out to eager customers. Initially Adolph wanted to call the game simply “Hobby”, but his application for a trademark was turned down, so instead the game became known as Subbuteo.

Why Subbuteo? In a rather convoluted piece of logic the name comes from the latin name Falco subbuteo, which is a bird of prey more commonly known as the Eurasian Hobby, which links back to Adolph’s original choice of name.

The first sets were quite simple, with wire and paper goal posts and cardboard cut out players attached to weighted buttons. It wasn’t until 1961 that the more recognisable three dimensional plastic men would be introduced, which in turn saw various changes and refinements until we reach the Eighties, when the nicely painted “lightweight” figure was introduced.

One of the big draws of Subbuteo was that along with additional extras such as stadiums, scoreboards and the like, there were also a vast range of the figures available, all painted with the playing kits of various real life teams, which inevitably appealed to football fans immensely.

The Subbuteo company also branched out into other sports, and you could get similarly adapted versions of games such as Cricket and Rugby.

Sadly this attention to detail didn’t translate into commercial success (a real shame) and the Subbuteo company ended up being acquired by Waddington’s, who slowly dropped most of the less popular parts of the range (including the other sports) before they too were swallowed by the toy behemoth that is Hasbro.

Whilst Hasbro kept the brand going for a while, by the early 21st Century they were doing their best to kill the range off, and indeed did at one point, until the media got involved and Hasbro rather grudgingly, it would appear, brought it back. Gone now were the little plastic figures, to be replaced with flat plastic printed images of real life players. A bit of a travesty really…

Yahtzee is a game played with five ordinary dice and it borrows its rules heavily from the card game Poker. Players take turns to throw the five dice, with the aim being to try and match one of the allowed scoring combinations. After rolling the player can choose to roll any number of the dice again, and then once more, in order to try and improve the combination of dice.

Each player has a score sheet on which to keep track of their total points, and at the end of each turn they must write a score in against one of the allowed combinations of their choosing. The combinations are things like four or five of a the same number (the latter being given the name Yahtzee) or a straight (a run of numbers, for example 4-5-6-7).

If they don’t match any combination, or the sequence they have achieved already has a score against it, they must choose one of the combinations and score a zero against it. When all players have scored a number in every box of their score sheets, the game is over and the winner is the player with the highest total score.

I remember the game was advertised with a varied group of exotic, rich and famous types (including I believe a guy wearing a white suit and a fez if memory serves) sat playing the game, with the eventual winner declaring “Yahtzee! I win”, much to the disgust of the others.

Yahtzee first appeared in 1956 published by the E.S. Lowe Company, until 1973 when Milton Bradley bought E.S. Lowe. Milton Bradley went on to create several different variations of the game, including a travel version where the dice are encased in a plastic shell so they don’t get lost, and Word Yahtzee, where the dice have letters on instead of numbers and, unsurprisingly, you have to make words in order to score points.

Pop-Up Pirate was created by Japanese toy company Tomy, with it’s original name being Kurohige Kiki Ippatsu, which apparently means Blackbeard in Danger. I think I prefer the name we ended up with to be honest!

As the name suggests the game features a little plastic buccaneer who sits inside a big brown barrel. Players are armed with some little plastic swords which they take turns poking into holes in the side of the barrel, a bit like a magician sticking swords into a magic cabinet containing his glamourous assistant.

One of the holes will cause the little pirate chap to leap out of the barrel, as if the sword has come into contact with his wee little pirate backside. Whichever player causes this to happen is out, and the whole game starts again until only one player remains.

I’m always reminded of games like Jaws and Buckaroo! whenever I think off Pop-Up Pirate, I guess because they all involve a sudden surprise event happening which signals the end of the game.

The game is still available in its original form, and because it takes so little time to play you can be sure that even those with the shortest attention span will manage to last out to the end of the game. There have also been other versions, including a Star Wars themed one with Darth Vader taking the place of the pirate. Quite why Darth Vader would be hiding in a barrel though I don’t know…

Bringing the collection bang up to date there is now also a version of the game which doubles as a 4-port USB hub, great for passing time during slow periods at the office!

KerPlunk first appeared in 1967, and is another of those stalwart games which is still around today and will be around for as long as people are willing to play board games. Even when we’re all connected directly via a brain link to some virtual world, we’ll probably still be playing it then, except our virtual avatar will be wearing a sombrero, have green skin and crab claws, which would actually make the game a fair bit harder to play.

If you happen to have never played the game here’s a brief overview. A transparent plastic tube has a number of sticks inserted through little holes in its side, half way down its length. When enough sticks are inserted it forms a sort of floor, onto which a stack of marbles are placed.

Players take it in turns to remove a stick, being careful to not drop too many marbles, as the player with the fewest marbles after all the marbles have dropped is the winner. It’s a bit like a more nail biting, and potentially noisier, version of Jack Straws.

I seem to recall our household inherited a copy of KerPlunk from somewhere rather than being purchased, but it looked identical to the one in the picture above. Apparently the earlier versions were made from purple rather than yellow plastic, but were otherwise identical.

Today’s version has been made a bit prettier, and now sports a spiral slide down the bottom half of the tube which dropped marbles roll around. I’m sure its quite fascinating to watch, but I wonder if this minimises the amount of KerPlunking sound you get from the dropped marbles. Part of the appeal of the original was that the marbles dropped such a distance that they made quite a loud sound on landing at the bottom of the tube.

Twister is a simple enough game to play. A plastic sheet with a four by four grid of dots is laid on the ground. The dots are in lines of red, green, yellow and blue. A spinner is also included which when spun instructs the current player which colour dot they have to place a particular hand or foot on.

At first things are pretty easy, but as the game progresses the players end up in a contorted mess of limbs as they struggle to reach the correct coloured dot. If any player falls during all of this, they are out of the game, and the winner is the last one left standing, if standing is the right word to use that is.

Since it becomes pretty near impossible to use the spinner whilst playing, normally one person not taking part in the actual game does all the spinning. Whenever a game of Twister is suggested there is funnily enough never a shortage of people (especially adults) who are more than willing to take on the task of spinning the spinner.

It’s a game that can be played by both young and old, although adults sometimes have the edge since they are normally more able to reach across the playing mat. Kids also have to be extra careful when playing not to get trapped underneath a heavier adult player!

The game was first released in 1966, and is still available today, along with a whole slew of variations and branded versions. It’s also possible to get a duvet cover, beach towel and even clothes featuring that unforgettable pattern of coloured dots.

Sure, there have always been more adult board games, just take a look at the likes of Monopoly, Cluedo and of course Chess, but the late Seventies and whole of the Eighties brought a new wave of games aimed primarily at adults because they either required a broad base of knowledge to play (e.g. Trivial Pursuit) or were a bit more strategic, like Chess.

Kensington fell firmly into the latter camp of strategy based board games, though unlike Chess its rules were actually very simple. Two players each have fifteen counters in either red or blue. They start by taking turns to place counters onto the game board, which was made up of adjoining triangles, squares and hexagons. Once all the counters were on the board players could then slide one counter along a line of the board on their turn.

The object of the game was to form a hexagon using six of your coloured counters. There were three white hexagons in the middle of the board, and two red and two blue on opposite sides, and you had to form a hexagon around either one of the white ones, or one of your own colour.

Along the way it was also possible to make things more difficult for your opponent by forming triangles and squares with your counters. Making a triangle allowed you to move one of your opponents pieces out of the way, whilst completing a square let you move two counters.

The game was created in 1979 by Brian Taylor and Peter Forbes, and came in a fold out wallet about the same size as a vinyl album. It was named after the affluent area of London, and included a picture on the reverse of the Kensington Park Monument and another of the two creators sat playing the game in view of the Royal Albert Hall. Quite why it was named after Kensington though I really do not know!

Sadly the game is no longer in print, but I guess it’s so simple you could have a go at making your own version. If you want the full rules then take a look at the Tragsnart! website, which is where I went to jog my memory on how to play it.

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.

If you were playing it properly their were two types of cards. Specialist cards detailing a particular playing piece were dealt to each player at the start of the game, then each player took a turn to draw a Doctor card from the pile. These cards told you which piece to try and remove, and how much money you got if you were successful. If the player failed, and another player had a Specialist card for that piece, they could try to remove the piece too. When all pieces had been removed, the player with the most money was the winner.

Operation was a fun game, and has been popular ever since it was first released in 1965. Over the years it hasn’t really changed a great deal, although in more recent years there have been several special editions of it, including versions based on movies and TV shows such as Shrek, The Simpsons (predictably enough you’re operating on Homer) and most recently a Toy Story 3 Buzz Lightyear version.

The Game Of Life is, as the name suggests, based around the story of a person’s lifetime. The idea is as you travel around the game board different events will shape out a fictional life history for each player. Each player chooses a different coloured car, and inserts into the driving seat a little pink or blue peg, depending on whether they are a girl or a boy (though I suppose there was nothing stopping you living out a life as the opposite sex, as the choice of male or female was largely irrelevant).

You car is your playing piece, and as you spin the rainbow coloured spinner to travel around the board there are certain squares you can land on which then add further little pink or blue pegs to your car. First you get married (nope, no choice in the matter on this one) and then further round the board certain squares would present you with a child (or possibly even twins) to build up your family.

Going back though, your first decision in the game was whether you should go to University or jump straight into the world of work. Going to college meant you could get a better paid job, which since the ultimate aim of the game was to be the player with the most money at the end meant this could well be the better route to take. As with life itself though, there was no guarantee this would be the case…

As you progress round the board you encounter various types of spaces, much like any similar board game, with some yielding you extra money, whilst others might mean you have to shell out for a fine or repairs to your house. At regular intervals there were Pay Day squares, which gave you an amount of money depending on what job you ended up getting at the start of the game.

There was also the option of buying yourself insurance and the option to purchase status symbols, such as villas in the sun or flashy cars, which all helped build up a nice little nest egg for you when you reach retirement at the end of the game. Make more than a million and you would end your days in the Millionaire’s Mansion, otherwise it was the slightly less glamorous world of the Retirement Home for you.

In terms of complexity Game of Life sits somewhere between a standard boardgame of the “roll the dice and follow the instructions on the square” style of board game (as almost always featured in those Annual books you can get at Christmas) and something like Monopoly. There wasn’t as much strategy involved as Monopoly, but at least the Game of Life had a definite end point which you knew would be reached within an hour or so of play.

I’ve yet to mention the most stand out (if you’ll excuse the pun) feature of Game of Life though, which was the board itself. It game with a load of little plastic buildings and hills which slotted into the board to make it a little more three dimensional. The biggest of these pieces was the central mountain which housed the trademark spinner, which looked really nice and also meant it was much harder to lose than the dice that come with most games.

The Game of Life was one of my favourite board games as a kid, and I guess I can’t have been the only one. Whilst it has been updated and changed many times, the Game of Life first appeared in the 1960’s and is still going strong today, and is also available in various special editions and in computer game form.

Finally, it may surprise you (it certainly did me) to learn that a very similar game could actually have been enjoyed by someone who could be considered a Child of the 1880’s! Game of Life was originally released by Milton Bradley (actually a real man, and not just the name of a company) in the 1860’s. Back then it’s full title was actually “The Checkered Game of Life” and it was far simpler, being just a square board divided into black and red squares, and more like those Annual style board games I mentioned earlier.