Whatever happened to simple board games? I remember growing up, my family had a toy closet. In this toy closet were several shelves, full of toys and boxes. But more importantly, we have shelves and shelves literally FILLED with board games. These were the backbone of my indoor entertainment growing up. I guess the children of the 80's had a different childhood than children of today and for that I am sad. However, today I have been brought back to my childhood by the simple pleasure of playing Battleship with my cousin. Playing this game got me thinking of all the different board games I had growing up.
Fireball Island This game was one of those wonderful inventions with a ginormous board and box, that forced your friends to come to your house because it could not be transported well. The point of the game was to safely reach the top of the plastic mountain without being knocked off and sent back several spaces by the "fireballs" (red marbles) that were placed randomly around the board. There was a certain amount of strategy that went along with this game, with cards and caves that allowed you to hide from the fireballs. I will have to brush up on the rules a bit more, but the ultimate goal was to reach the top and retrieve the jewel before anyone else did...very Indiana Jones, if you ask me.
Mouse Trap Another large game that was definitely not made for really young kids. This game could be played in several different ways. You are a plastic mouse moving randomly around the board. As you move along, you build the mouse trap. Once the trap is built, the goal is to trap every other mouse in the game in the trap and be the last mouse standing, so it's really like a Battle Royal of mice, fighting to the death over cheese. I think I always played with the trap already built and went from there. But this game was an icon of the 80's, though invented long before I was around. The pure absurdity of the trap made this game well worth it...except when the trap would not work properly, which was often.
Crossfire This was an intense game made for older kids. Made for two players, you sat opposite your opponent, each of you with a marble-shooting gun. In the middle of the board were two pieces, one for each opponent. The marbles shot along the board and the point was to shoot rapidly until you pushed your opponent's piece into their goal on the opposite side of the board. This game was so intense because it left your hands aching from the constant shooting and your heart racing. Typical games could last from about 10 seconds to minutes on end. Definitely not for the weak of heart.
Guess Who This game came along later in my childhood, but was no less memorable. The game basically served as a child's First Guide to Physical Stereotypes. Each player has a rack filled with stupid-looking cartoon characters, with overwhelmingly obvious physical characteristics. To start, you drew a card which had one of the characters on it. You then proceeded to ask a series of questions to weed out which character your opponent had drawn. Is your opponent a man? Yes (eliminate the women). Does he have glasses? No (get rid of all those guys with huge spectacles). And the game went on like this until you had narrowed your board down to one person. The first person to successfully guess the other person's character was the winner. This game unwittingly developed a whole new generation of racists and sexists, because the last character you wanted to draw was a black guy or a woman...because there were like 2 of each and if you had one of them, you pretty much were guaranteed to lose.
Perfection This was a game that was played solo, and helped to develop me into the recluse I am today. Basically, you had a board with about 20 different shapes cut into it, and 20 pieces corresponding to those shapes. The board pushed down and had a timer. The point of the game was to place all the pieces correctly into the board before the timer went off or, "POP!! Goes Perfection." Another game not for the weak of heart, because that timer ticking away was like a time bomb, and if that damn board popped, you basically jumped 10 feet in the air because you were focused solely on the pieces and it shocked you every time. To this day I wonder how many kids had fatal heart attacks while playing this game. I guess this was made to prepare kids for future careers in Bomb Squads, but all it did for me was to cause me to nearly crap in my pants on a regular basis.
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