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.

Unlike most hippos, these plastic version dined on little white plastic marbles. A number of marbles were put in the middle of the game and each player then frantically pressed their little switches to get their hippo to eat the most marbles and win the game.

Each of the hippos was a different colour (none of them grey, the traditional hippopotamus colour) and apparently they all had names, presumably in an effort to inject some kind of character into them. The purple hippo was called Lizzie, the orange one Henry, green was Homer and Harry was yellow. Over the years replacement hippos were brought in (the original ones presumably bloated from a diet of plastic marbles). Henry changed colour to blue and Lizzie was replaced by Happy, who was pink.

The most recent version has changed the names again, and the current Hungry Hungry Hippo squad are Sweetie, Bottomless, Picky and Veggie (pink, yellow, orange and green colours respectively).

I remember the TV advert being aired incessantly in the run up to Christmas one year, which made me want the game immensely (sadly Father Christmas never delivered). I’ve embedded a clip which appears to be the US version of the advert, but I’m sure the lyrics sound eerily familiar.

It was a game that rewarded steady hands. It consisted of a large number of miniature plastic objects including oars, crutches and swords (the Jack Straws), which were grouped together in one hand then left to tumble under gravity onto a table.

Using a small tool (basically a piece of wire with a hook on one end) the aim of the game was for each player to remove a piece from the pile without moving any other pieces. If you did move another piece you were out of the game.

Really simple yet it could be quite addictive. It had been around for many many years before the eighties came around, but I think as with many such toys this was the time period when these sorts of games started to get phased out in favour of more modern toys containing far fewer real hours worth of play in them.

You might also know this game as Pick Up Sticks, although in truth this is a subtly different game. Instead of little shovels and things the game is just played with a large number of wooden (or plastic) sticks. Since the sticks have nothing for a hook to catch hold of, Pick Up Sticks was normally played just by picking the sticks up with your fingers.

One such toy for me was Screwball Scramble, which I must have asked for several years running. Sadly I never got one of my own, and had to be content with playing on the ones they sometimes put out in the shops in the run up to Christmas.

Screwball Scramble was an obstacle course for ball bearings, the aim being to get your ball bearing from the start of the course to the end as quickly as possible. You controlled the game via a series of buttons and switches at the front of the maze which were all mechanical in nature – no batteries required here.

Stabbing the buttons and flicking the switches caused various parts of the obstacle course to be activated, so with careful timing and a modicum of good luck you could move your ball bearing about without actually touching it. That is assuming the ball didn’t jump off completely and you had to replace it!

The first obstacle was a tilting walkway which comprised of three see-saw like sections, which led to a little arm which could be rotated whilst holding the ball. The arm dropped the ball onto a wire ramp which deposited the ball onto a wobble table with little pegs sticking out of it, intended to deflect the ball the wrong way.

At the end of the “unstable table”, as it was known, was a chute which took the ball to the next challenge, a series of little crater like holes. Pressing a button caused a rod to push up out of the hole, so if you pressed it hard enough it could flip the ball up onto the next crater.

From the final crater you had to flip the ball through a hoop and into a covered maze, which you tipped from side to side in a similar manner to the pegged table. After negotiating the maze to another arm the ball bearing ended up in the final contraption, a catapult, which could launch the ball into the finish cup, if you pressed the relevant button hard enough.

The game had a built in timer for just sixty seconds, which was quite a harsh time limit, although a master can achieve some quick times. Check out the video below for a storming 8.5 seconds attempt. If you fancy having a go at beating this time then the good news is that Screwball Scramble is still available now, and doesn’t appear to have changed a great deal other than in a few colour tweaks. Perhaps I should try asking Father Christmas for it this year?

Quite often though it was these unasked for presents that actually became your favourites.  I’ve mentioned this before with the Don’t Upset Me game I received one year, and another good example was the rather excellent Stay Alive, which also appeared magically in my Christmas gifts one year.

Stay Alive is a really simple game to learn, and can have up to four players.  Each player sits on one side of the game board, and places their coloured marbles on the grid in the middle of the board.  The grid is made up of a number of sliders with holes in various places, one set running horizontally and another set running vertically.  Once all the marbles are placed players take it in turns to move the sliders with the aim of causing their opponents marbles to fall through the holes, whilst also ensuring their own marbles are as safe as possible.

The two sets of sliders are layered, so when moving the top sliders you don’t necessarily know whether there is a hole in a certain grid position on the bottom layer, which makes for some very tense moments as your opponent slides a hole in the top layer under your marble.  You never were sure whether you had lost a marble or not until the slider clicked into place.

I spent many happy hours playing Stay Alive, and one of the best things about it was that because each game was fairly quick to play you never got bored, so best of three (or even best of thirteen) matches were quite common.

It’s obviously a game that has stood the test of time, since it was around in at least the seventies (possibly earlier) and you can still buy it today. Well worth a look if you want something strategic but don’t want to learn a massive set of rules.

Role playing games are often stereotyped as being a bit geeky, as to somebody not used to playing such games it appears there is usually no board or playing pieces but instead a whole bunch of numbers and some weird looking dice.  The Ghostbusters role playing game deliberately tried to distance itself from these more technical games in order to create a more relaxed experience for the players.

Each player created themselves a character by assigning 12 points to each of four traits, these being Brains, Muscle, Moves and Cool, which are fairly self explanatory.  You could also select a particular Talent related to each of these traits, which made your character better at performing certain tasks.  If this all sounded like too much work then you could also choose to play as one of the movie characters, as the game came with statistics cards for each of the main characters of the film.

To play one person was chosen as Ghostmaster (a play on the usual term of Gamesmaster) who described situations that the players characters found themselves in.  Players could ask questions and suggest actions for their characters, and it was up to the Ghostmaster to decide how much information to reveal, or how difficult an action was to perform.

For example, say a player suggested doing some kind of acrobatic move to dodge a ghost.  The Ghostmaster might decide this was a tricky thing to do correctly so would assign a how difficulty value to it.  The player would see if they performed the move correctly by rolling the same number of dice as the value of the relevant character attribute, in this example the Moves attribute.  If the player character had a talent befitting this task (for example, Gymnastics) then they could roll an extra three dice.  If the total on the dice exceeded the difficulty value they achieved their aim, otherwise it failed in some manner decided by the Ghostmaster.

To hinder the players further one of the dice that had to be rolled was called the Ghost Die, which had a picture of the Ghostbusters logo instead of a six.  Having this come up meant something went wrong even if the player managed to achieve the required difficulty score.

Each player also had a supply of Brownie Points, initially starting at 20 with more awarded for doing things the Ghostmaster deemed clever or particularly suited to the players character. The player could use Brownie Points to lessen the effects of any failures they may have, and also to increase their chances of success in the first place by effectively buying extra dice to make difficult rolls with.

What I liked most about Downfall were the dials on the main playing board.  These reminded me of the dials on safes that you always saw people twiddling, ear up to the door, when trying to rob millionaires on films (the safe was always hidden behind a picture for some reason).

The idea in Downfall was to get all your coloured counters from the top of the playing board to the bottom by twisting the dials, which had little holes in them that could pick up the counters.  In the meantime your opponent was trying to do the exact same thing on their side of the playing board.

Players took it in turns to twist one of the dials, although you weren’t allowed to twist the dial your opponent had just twisted.  As you twisted the holes in the dials past counters in other dials the counters would drop into the lower dial if two holes were alligned.

What made Downfall such a good game was that it was such an incredibly simple idea, but you could sit there agonising over which dial to turn in case you inadvertantly helped out your opponent by dropping some of their counters down the board.

The original version of Downfall was made by MB Games, but is no longer in production.  Hasbro now own the MB Games name and have a new version on the market though, called New Downfall (original eh?) which has slightly more modern styling to the playing board but is otherwise pretty much the same game.  There is also a smaller travel sized version available.

Mr. Pop was a cross between Perfection, Guess Who? and Mr. Potato Head.  It was a single player game in which you first had to pick a card that had a picture of a man’s face on it.  You had to recreate that face by inserting plastic pieces of hair, eyes, noses and other facial features into slots on a plastic head.

Sounds pretty easy so far, but you had to do this against the clock.  The plastic face was mounted on a plastic board that featured a clockwork timer (that’s what we like – no batteries!) so to play you wound up the timer and pushed the head back until it clicked into a locked position.  Letting the timer run out caused the head to pop forward, shooting all the plastic face pieces out at the player, which was quite a shock.

The game was intended for younger players, but adults had just as much fun playing it, and quite often were worse than the kids.  It’s a crying shame this game is no longer available as beneath all the fun it was quite educational, teaching concentration, pattern matching and hand eye co-ordination skills.