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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.
The box depicted a bearded man sat in a chair, with an oriental looking lady in a white dress stood behind him. The man was sat with his hands pushed together fingertip to fingertip in the manner of a typical James Bond villain, just before he pressed the button to drop 007 into a pool of sharks or something equally devious and evil.
The game was a basically a logic challenge for two players. One player made up a secret code of four different colours, and the other player had to guess what it was. They did this by placing coloured pegs in little holes on the playing board. The other player would then put in a number of black and white pegs to mark the other players guess. A black peg meant you had a peg of the correct colour, but in the wrong position, whilst a white peg meant a correct colour in the correct position (or it may have been the other way around - either way it doesn’t really matter). The other player then made another guess based on this feedback, and this continued until either the code was guessed, or the player run out of space on the board to make guesses.
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.
It’s surprising how many games that first appeared in the late 70’s and early 80’s are still available today, and also how many of those haven’t really been updated over the years. A good example of this is Perfection, which apart from a change in the colour of the plastic looks identical today to the version I had in the 80’s. I guess part of the reason for this is that those games appealed to and could be played by people of all ages, from grandfather to grandson.
Yahoo! It’s Buckaroo! A donkey doesn’t do what it doesn’t want to do. So went one of the TV ads for Buckaroo that I remember being aired as a child. Buckaroo involved a spring loaded plastic donkey that players took turns trying to load up with little plastic items such as a rope, a lantern and a shovel. They had to be placed carefully, as if you were too heavy handed the mule would kick up his back legs, spraying plastic tools every which way. Whoever triggered the bucking bronco would be pointed at by the other players and declared the loser.