Flashback Thursday - The crazy games of my youth

My family played a fair amount of Yahtzee and Clue but only played Risk on holidays and with secret missions.

More notably, between my friends and I we probably owned all of the characters for James Ernest’s Brawl, a real-time fighting game with cat-girls and Foglio art. I also bought Lunch Money on the way to summer camp. It was “Take That Mechanic: The Game.” Play Stick in the Eye to skip someone’s turn. You could steal cards from their hands. The art was photography if Diane Arbus was working before the turn of the century and purely with school girls. It was so popular that the counselors borrowed it after lights out to play on their own. For two weeks, I was cool.

I remember those TSR mini-games. I liked Viking Gods, but it somehow disappeared from my collection many years ago. I still have Vampyre, and it still gets played once every few years.

ChristopherMD wrote: In the I think early 80's I had a game based on Kohs Block Design Test using the red-white cubes. It had a four-sided tower that spun with a design printed on cards you insert. You had to match the design with your cubes before the tower spun it from your sight. It wasn't until later in life that I learned it was based on an intelligence test. I ultimately found it too easy so stopped playing it. Never been able to find the name of it since.

Found it after trying to remember the name of this game for decades now.

boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/100109/combi-4

ubarose wrote: Just remembered a couple more.

Sub Search - Like 3D battle ship. It was cool until the puppy peed on it.

We also had some game with a helicopter with a hook on a wire that you maneuvered to pick things up. The game sucked, but it was fun to make the helicopter fly around.

I forgot about Sub Search or maybe I blocked the memory of the puppy pee on the Sub Search. I also forgot about King Oil . Great bits but the game sucked.

Shellhead wrote: I remember those TSR mini-games. I liked Viking Gods, but it somehow disappeared from my collection many years ago. I still have Vampyre, and it still gets played once every few years.

Minigames is right, Smeagol. I still have Revolt on Antares. In fact, I wrote a piece about it a while back: therewillbe.games/articles-beyond-review...hs-revolt-on-antares

I had Viking Gods since then, too, but sold it a few years ago for a rather princely sum, if I do say so myself. We also played Vampyre, Remember the Alamo!, and They've Invaded Pleasantville pretty regularly. Only played Saga once, though (the owner was a friend's cousin who was just in town on vacation.) I was 11 or 12 then. Games I played as a kid ranged from everything classic (checkers, chess, backgammon, a billion different card games) to the usual Parker Brothers/Milton Bradley stuff (Clue, Monopoly, Mastermind) until the day I went with some older friends to a hobby store and discovered Avalon Hill. My first was also Panzerblitz (must've been the bright orange box that looked like nothing else.) But there was also a Lord of the Rings game that I borrowed from the public library repeatedly when I was 7 or 8. I've never been able to find a listing for it on BGG and a few inquiries over the years, even to collectors, have come up with nothing. It was about Gollum (Smeagol!) leading Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom. I don't remember the exact title, but I'm pretty sure that's what attracted me because I'd read LotR around then for the first time.

My family played Diplomacy. Absolutely nuts. Until i got older and into designer games I didn't realise how bonkers this was really. We used to play it 3-4 players as my Mum was less interested and usually it ended in tears. When i was a teenager I apprecaited it more and played several day long games with 7, but its an excessive game really, much better play by email.

We also had Dungeon, which is a great family game, and the usual Clue scrabble Monopoly. etc.

I played a lot of Intercept when I was a kid -- the game was terrible but the hidden movement was interesting and it had great sound effects.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/54697

A much better game that got plenty of play was Tank Battle -- a combination of Stratego and Battleship with fantastic model tanks.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/74110

Landslide was a big one for me. As a missionary kid living in France, it made me feel like I understood the math of US electoral politics without really getting... politics in general.

Crossbows & Catapults was at once amazing and... a little mystifying in the looseness of the rules, as if I was being encouraged to use house rules, which felt alien and empowering at the same time.

We didn't have a lot of boardgames - mostly card games got played at our house. Later there was Monopoly and Cluedo and a few other MB type games. But there was one odd-ball thing I do remember - ET The Extraterrestrial The Board Game. I have no idea where it came from - it was so out of character for my parents to own something like that. I don't recall ever playing it as a family either. I think I used to play it solo/multihanded. So weird. I don't remember much of the gameplay now except you had to go around the board collecting things that were needed to enable ET to go home, while evading agents (I don't think these were NPCs though... maybe die rolls or card flips determined success?

We played Wizard's Quest, Careers, and Shadowlord a lot.

Two most off-the-beaten-path were probably Mystic Skull and Dark Shadows

Mad Magazine card game.

Shellhead wrote: I remember those TSR mini-games. I liked Viking Gods, but it somehow disappeared from my collection many years ago. I still have Vampyre, and it still gets played once every few years.

I remember playing the mini game Saga, it was simple but fun. Viking Gods looks awesome, I never played it. I don't know, I think the 1980s had better games then the 1970s.

Viking Gods was a very simple Ragnorak-themed wargame, with just one interesting twist: the Hela unit effectively functioned like a wandering sphere of annihilation. The bad guys could influence but not fully control her movement, so they sometimes also lost units to Hela.

My brothers and I played all the MB/Parker Brothers games listed above. We played Stratego a lot. And one called Dealers Choice, which was similar to Mastermind except you bought and sold cars. Every player had their own Blue Book, with different values for each car. We played enough of it so that once you knew the value of one or two cars in a particular Blue Book, you knew which ones were the high-value cars in that Blue Book. "Don't sell him that Mercedes - that's his expensive car!"

My dad didn't believe in owning a copy of Battleship, when there were such things as pencils and graph paper. On the one hand, it wasn't nearly as cool. On the other, you could add more ships, make the board bigger, etc.

We also played a lot of 4-player partnership Rook. I was the oldest, and after I left for the Army my two youngest brothers made up signals to cheat my dad and evil stepmom.

My grandma loved Scrabble, and we played that wrong. She taught us the game, but left the bonus spaces live for the whole game. That makes you play a much tighter game and burns the value of 'S' into your brain. I told her that was against the rules as written, but she didn't care. She also didn't like to get penalized for illegal words, so playing an illegal word had a gentler penalty, a'la Words With Friends.

I just remembered a very crazy game from my youth: The Guinness Game of World Records. A roll-and-move board game with trivia questions and dexterity tests.