Managing Editor
If you grew up in the 1950s and 1960s like I did, chances are that your closet was filled with popular board games of the day like mine was.
My first board games were Candyland, Chutes and Ladders and Uncle Wiggly. Of that group, Uncle Wiggly was my favorite because it was about taking a trip through a forest and reading simple rhymes found on each card drawn when it was your turn. The winner was always the first player to reach Dr. Possum’s House.
As I became older, for my 7th birthday in 1960 I was given a Go to the Head of the Class game. This was always entertaining for me, especially the game tokens which were cardboard images of adults and kids on wooden bases. The objective was to move across a playing field of student desks from nursery school to high school graduation by answering simple questions.
In fourth grade in 1962, I received a Cootie game for Christmas. That game baffled me as you had to build a large plastic bug-like creature called a Cootie by collecting various bug body parts. Not being into science in school, Cootie wasn’t my favorite and wasn’t played a lot after my younger brother carried off a Cootie body part and then lost it somewhere outside.
My brother was much more hands-on growing up than I was. Therefore, he received building blocks, Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set as gifts, while I was presented with board games.
By the time I was in sixth grade, my closet was filled with Monopoly, Aggravation, Scrabble, Game of the States, Chinese Checkers, Parcheesi, Clue, Concentration and Yahtzee. I also had a Lassie game, Careers, Battleship, and a World War I aerial combat game called Dogfight.
I didn’t own every board game. For some reason, I never had Life, Password, Sorry, Easy Money or Racko and I never wanted Milles Borne as I never understood what that game was all about.
A few games I owned required more physical skills than metal prowess and some of them were Mousetrap, Operation and Bas-Ket. In Mousetrap, you rolled a marble through a large contraption and the person with the fastest marble to complete the course winning. Operation involved extracting small plastic objects with tweezers from a funny looking cutout of a man. It needed a battery and the patient you were “operating on” would buzz and his nose would light up if you touched the side of a cutout space in retrieving an object. Bas-Ket was great fun and had players moving levers on a makeshift basketball court to connect for basketball baskets using a plastic ping pong ball.
At that same time, my parents gave me a Twister game and since my brother never wanted to play that, it sat in my closet for years. It got more use when I took it with me to college and there was no shortage of players during college co-ed dormitory parties.
I also had a table-top ice hockey game and an electric football game. The ice hockey game was the kind where you used levers to maneuver a small plastic puck up and down and take shots on goal. Unfortunately, my ice hockey game was ruined when I left it on the floor in my bedroom and my brother ran in there not knowing it was on the floor. He stepped on it and the levers became severely bent and twisted. My father was unable to straighten them to salvage the game so we could play it.
The electric football game involved small plastic players in realistic football poses who moved by vibration when the electricity was turned on. You could also pass a tiny oval felt football by pulling back the arm of the quarterback but never quite knew where a receiver would travel based upon the vibrations.
During my sophomore year of high school, I received both a Stratego and a Risk game for Christmas. I had also purchased my own chess and checkers games using money I had earned on my paper route. Instructions that came with the checkboard showed how to play a game called Backgammon, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned how to play that game.
Stratego quickly became one of my favorites. It’s a two-person contest where you advance colorful plastic military ranked pieces across a battlefield and the winner captures an opponent’s flag. Risk also fascinated me as a game of worldwide conquest where players roll dice to try and occupy countries on a global map.
My original Risk game had wooden game pieces that were much more durable when they accidentally fell on the floor and were then scooped up by my dog and chewed. The newer Risk comes with plastic game pieces that my dog would enjoy chewing and swallowing.
After a lifetime of playing board games, I’ve come to appreciate that the beauty of a game lies in its challenging complexity. <
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