Child Of The 1980's

Mouse Trap is by no means a product of the 1980’s, indeed it was first conceived in the 1960’s.  The game was based on a drawing by US cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who drew images of weird and wacky inventions which were generally built out of everyday objects and completely over engineered.  If you’ve ever seen a Roadrunner cartoon think of the kind of outlandish designs concocted by Wile E. Coyote.

The game itself would however be fairly run of the mill if it wasn’t for the plastic contraption in the middle of the board.  This weird device was meant to be a mouse trap, but rather than a piece of wood with a sprung loaded trap and a piece of cheese this mouse trap consisted of a weird obstacle course that would give the mouse plenty of time to escape!

Turning a handle attached to some cogs wound back an arm which then flicked a boot that kicked over a bucket containing a ball bearing.  The ball bearing rolled down a set of steps and then a chute where it hit a long pole with a hand on the top.  Jogging this caused a ball in a bathtub to start rolling, which then fell through a hole onto a see saw, propelling a little figure of a man into a wooden tub.  This finally caused a cage to start to descend down a pole to catch the poor unsuspecting mouse!

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Connect Four is a game whose roots lie within the old pen and paper game of Naughts and Crosses (better known as Tic Tac Toe in the US).  It is a game for two people played on a 7×6 grid and as the name suggests the idea is to try to connect four of your playing pieces in a straight line.

Players take it in turns to drop counters into one of the seven columns, gravity doing what it does best and dropping it down to rest at the bottom of the board, or on top of any other counters that may have already been placed in that column.  Whoever gets four of their counters in a line either horizontally, vertically or diagonally is the winner.  If the board is filled and no line of four is generated, then a draw is declared.

Connect Four was first published by Milton Bradley Games in 1974, and has proven to be a simple to learn, popular game for young and old alike.  This version of the game consisted of a blue plastic playing board and a number of thick red and yellow circular counters.  The playing board had a little flap at the bottom to keep the counters in place during play, and to allow then all to be released with a rattle and a crash at the end of a game.  For many kids this was the most fun part, as it made a great noise and a great mess as all the pieces tumbled out onto the table.

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Guess Who? is a wonderfully simple yet incredibly enjoyable boardgame that was first launched by Milton Bradley in the UK in 1979.  It went on to become one of the decades most popular games, and was eventually launched in the US in 1982.

Each player has a game board containing images of 24 named charicatures which are on little plastic flippers.  A random card with a picture of one of the characters is drawn by each player, and put in a little slot at the front of their playing board.  Players now take turns asking questions to try and discover which character their opponents card shows.

Questions can only be asked that have a yes or no answer, so you had to say “Does your person have black hair?” instead of “What colour hair do they have?”.  By being clever about the questions you asked you could then eliminate certain characters by flipping down their image if their attributes didn’t match the answer to your question.  The trick was to try and ask questions that no matter which answer was provided, eliminated a decent proportion of the remaining characters.

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OK, this game predates the 1980’s a little, but I remember having it as a child and enjoyed it immensely, so I’m going to tell you about it anyway. The game was a licensed game to accompany the classic movie Jaws, but instead of the aim of being to catch a killer shark, it was actually more like a playful approach to shark dentistry.

Probably the closest comparison to the Jaws game is Buckaroo, although it’s kind of a reverse Buckaroo as your trying to remove items instead of add them. The game consisted of a cool plastic shark with a flappy mouth that snapped shut thanks to a couple of elastic bands, and a variety of different objects such as a bone, a gun, a broken wheel, an anchor and various other martime related items.

To play the game you pulled the sharks mouth open and dumped all the items inside, which weighed it down enough to remain open. Players then took it in turns to carefully remove an item from the sharks gaping maw using a plastic hook, that did look surprisingly like one of those pointy tools that dentists use to scrape the plaque of your teeth. If you weren’t careful the sharks mouth would suddenly snap shut, trapping the hook and making all the players jump out of their skins!

The word guessing game of Hangman has been around for many, many years, and whilst it demands two players it can be played almost anywhere, so long as you have something to write with and something to write on.

In case you don’t know the rules (surely unlikely) one player thinks of a word and draws a number of dashes to indicate how many letters it contains. The other player then tries to guess the word by shouting out letters. If the letter is part of the word it is written in place over the respective dashes. If it isn’t, lines are added to a picture of a man on the gallows, which if completed signifies the end of the game, and the person who thought of the word is the winner. Obviously if the other player guesses the word before the hangman image is completed then they win.

Given such a simple concept, you have to wonder what the point was of turning it into a boardgame when a pencil and paper do just as well, if not better. The boardgame version consisted of two hinged plastic playing boards, a bit like the Battleships boardgame, another game to come originally from a pen and paper original, although at least with Battleships you had little model ships that made it feel more like you were a Naval Commander. Each of the Hangman boards contained a lot of little plastic tiles with letters on, which when the board was opened up could be slot into little holes in the top.

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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.

I must have played this game hundreds of times, and I don’t think I ever completed it perfectly once. I certainly got down to having two or three marbles left on the board several times, and maybe even a single marble in the wrong position once or twice. This didn’t matter though because the game took such a short amount of time to play that you could always have another go really quickly.

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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.

Games such as Donkey Kong and Zaxxon (I wonder how many of you remember that one now?) were converted to a piece of cardboard and some plastic counters, but by far the best game to come out of this process was the Pacman boardgame. The playing board represented the maze which Pacman and the ghosts roamed around. It had lots of little holes drilled in it where white plastic balls could be placed, representing the dots that Pacman ate. Yellow balls were also provided to represent the powerpills that allowed Pacman to eat the ghosts.

The best part of the game by far were the player counters, each shaped like a Pacman but in four different colours. The playing pieces could actually eat the marbles off the board, so it was just like the videogame in that respect. The game also came with two plastic ghosts who started off in the centre of the board and were also moved by the player.

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