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Of all the boardgames to appear during the 1980′s, Trivial Pursuit has got to be the most enduring and best known. Everyone must surely have played it at some point, and therefore experienced the seemingly unending chase around the board to get your last wedge. The drawn out end game must surely be the games downfall, and the reason why when anybody suggests playing a game they are normally met with a series of groaned responses of the “Can’t we play something else” variety.
Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition appeared in 1982, although it’s amazing how many people thought the game was called Trivial Pursuits: Genius Edition. If you haven’t played it (unlikely) then the object of the game is to move around the board answering trivia questions and filling your counter with little wedges in six different colours. Once you had filled your counter you then had to head for the centre of the board, where your fellow players would get to choose the category they wanted to ask you. Get this question right and you won the game. The colours of the wedges referred to the different types of questions, which for the Genus edition were:-
- Blue – Geography
- Pink – Entertainment
- Yellow – History
- Brown – Art and Literature
- Green – Science and Nature
- Orange – Sports and Leisure
The game has since appeared in more than 30 different versions, including those for different decades (perhaps I should get the 1980s version myself, purely for research purposes you understand), plus Disney, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Warner Brothers editions and many more on top of that. All told around 88 million copies have been sold over the years.
Probably the worst thing about Trivial Pursuit is when you are playing it with someone who is a stickler for the rules. Most people will be prepared to start skipping certain rules to speed up the game, for example by allowing any square on the board to yield a wedge if the question is answered correctly, or allowing the player to choose their own question when landing on the centre space to try and win the game.
The worst people though are those who say that the exact answer on the card must be given otherwise the wedge won’t be awarded. This may not seem so bad in itself, but given that some of the answers on the cards are actually wrong (or have since become wrong due to the passage of time) this can be extremely irritating.
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.
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.
