Board To Death

Operation is a sick, sick game. We gather our children around a man on a table and we tell them to pull things out of him with tweezers, things he likely still needs , things that aren't really the problem with his health. Think of like this, the healthcare system in the US is so poor, so looked down upon, so laughably bad, that we made surgery into a fucking board game. Operation was one of those games I never actually owned, but I did play it from time to time whether at after school functions or friends houses. The prototype was invented in 1964 by John Spinello, a University of Illinois Industrial Design student at the time of its creation. He later sold the rights to it to our good friend Marvin Glass for a measly (well by todays standards I suppose) 500 dollars and the promise of a job upon graduation, a promise which Glass did not uphold. I think it's safe to say at this point, given his iron grip on the industry and his rather piss poor behavior - whether it's steal...

Of all the board games I'm likely to cover on this blog, none is as weird as Mouse Trap. Oh sure, you may think Candy Land, with it's sentient candy inhabitants or even The Game of Life, where you utilize escapism to...not escape from reality, would be stranger, but Mouse Trap really is probably the single most unique board game in existence, solely because of how it was designed. It's a board game where the board is basically secondary. It's simply a thing for the rest of the game to sit on top of. Because, really, Mouse Trap is the contraption, not the board. And while the board is cool looking, no matter what variation or changes they make to it (though of course classic is always the best in most cases), I'll argue that it's still secondary to the rest of the pieces that really make up what Mouse Trap is. Created in 1963, it was one of the first mass produced three dimensional board games. Working together, players are to build a Rube Goldberg type trap, whi...

Trouble is one of the oldest board game memories that I have. I don't have a lot of good memories growing up, but, before my mother remarried, we did spend a lot of time together in relatively good ways and one of those ways was playing Trouble. I think we went to Toys R Us and decided which board game to pick out, and I think we settled on Trouble because we often felt like we were so close to being in trouble ourselves all the time. It really just seemed very appropriate at the time. Launching in 1965 and originally made by Kohner Brothers for Irwin Toys (but later, like everything else, falling under Milton Bradley's enormous amazing technicolor umbrella), Trouble is - much like Candy Land - an extremely simple game. You simply need to move the pieces around the board while rolling your dice in the pop-o-matic, a concept that honestly I'm surprised I've only ever seen in Trouble, as it's extremely easy to lose dice and cheat with dice. With the pop-o-matic device...

  Candy Land is considered a classic, and for good, albeit somewhat confusing, reasons. Despite being easily the most "child accessible" board game there is, Candy Land was not a game that I played all that much. I remember playing it from time to time, but those memories are extremely vague and it certainly wasn't a board game that got played anywhere near as much as the others from my closet as I got older. But it's considered a child accessible game because there's simply not much strategy or difficulty to it whatsoever; players are never required to make any choices and instead just follow directions, and the winner is ultimately predetermined by the shuffle of the cards. But what if I were to tell you that Candy Land has undergone massive changes, thusly creating lore and almost having a feature film based off of it? Remember a few years ago when we started to hear news about feature films being based off board games? There was talk of a Monopoly movie, and B...

    One of the best board games I can remember playing as a child is Pay Day.   I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that a lot of board games were simply economic learning tools disguised as games to teach children how to properly manage money. This theory can be backed up somewhat by the sheer number of board games involved with handling money. Between Pay Day, Monopoly, The Game Of Life (that one I think is just a dead giveaway considering the title), and a lot of other more obscure games like Big Money, Easy Money, Allowance, Shopping Spree and a game literally just called Budget, because why try and hide something that obvious I suppose, it's pretty cut and dry, to me at least, that that's what some of these were aiming for. And while education and entertainment have long since been intertwined - Schoolhouse Rock, anyone? - this doesn't really come as a shock, but I will admit...playing these board games didn't teach me a goddamned thing about money management. I ...