Board To Death

I've said it before and I'll say it again: dinosaurs make anything cooler, even board games. Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs is a board game published by Waddingtons (which sounds more like a Paddington Bear's loser cousin than a board game publisher) and designed by Julian and Tonie Courtland Smith with art by Julian Courtland Smith and Jerker Eriksson, and let me just say that - for the record - if I ever had a kid and I named them Jerker, I'd fully understand if they grew up to hate me. It's completely valid. Released in 1985 and boasting 2-4 players and a thirty to sixty minute run time, it's on par with other board games that feature in depth designs and fantastical adventures, such as Fireball Island. This is yet another board game that has an expansive set, complete with excellent dinosaur figures you must avoid and even a working volcano that spews lava onto the board. This thing is really a work of art, man, and the fact that it seems relatively forgotten ...

If I were head of Milton-Bradley, and someone came up to me and said, "How about we make a game where kids launch fucking spiders at one another?", I wouldn't only give that person a raise on the spot, I would even make them my right hand man, because holy shit is that a hilarious idea. Beware The Spider is a board game produced by Milton-Bradley in 1980, though I could find no further information on the designer or the artist, and the playing time supposedly only runs for a mere 10 minutes, which makes it a perfect game for young kids (hence the age range they suggest on the box) to just while away an hour with on a boring rainy afternoon. Of course, this isn't the 90s anymore and kids have cell phones now for some reason, so. Anyway, the game takes 2 C-cell batteries to run, and the plot essentially goes like this: The plastic game base has a silver conductive web on which various plastic critters are placed. A felt spider is situated menacingly next to the web in i...

Town Dump might just be the single most obscure board game I've featured on this blog thus far, and that includes "Across The Board: A Horse Racing Game" , so that says something. Can I make an admission? I'm a sucker for dumpster diving. Growing up, my best friend's mom managed a series of apartment complexes, and because of that, he and I had the absolute run of the mill of the places, getting into unused apartments to film early short films and, of course, going dumpster diving. It was just a fantastically good time, and even in 2014 when I lived in Santa Cruz in a complex populated mostly by college students, I dumpster dove all the time, because the thing about college kids is they throw a lot of things away when they move home after college ends, and so you find a lot of excellent stuff for zero dollars. Once, my friend and I discovered a virtually new acoustic guitar in one of the dumpsters at his apartment complex, and you wouldn't believe some of the ...

Dogfight is, right off the bat, presented by absolutely killer artwork. But it's also presented by a rather honest combination of words, "American Heritage". It's true, the only thing more American than fighting in a war is starting a war. It's our national past time. Baseball? Nah, fuck Baseball. War is what we here in the USofA strive for. Like Screamin' Eagles, we have yet another plane fight board game, but unlike Screamin' Eagles this one is based in World War 1 and not whenever the hell Screamin' Eagles is supposedly based. I'm gonna go ahead and say in the 80s, and the Cold War, just to make it more interesting. Released in 1962 by Milton-Bradley under their American Heritage line of the Command Decision series of board games, with art by Charles H. Hubbell, it's a 45 minute game that can have up to 4 players and, much like Screamin' Eagles two decades later, also utilizes cards because, well, it's a board game and you kind of ne...

We're finally tackling a big one here, fellas, that's right...it's Battleship! Battleship is, I'm sure, a game that anyone and everyone has likely played at least once in their life. It wasn't a game I owned growing up, sadly, not for any particular reason either we just never bought a copy. But it's certainly a game I always loved. It's also a unique game in the sense of how its set up. It's one of the rare board games where you don't get to see where the other player is, because it doesn't take place on the same board as you're on. A truly novel concept back then, certainly. Not novel enough for a terrible feature film presumably based on it in the loosest sense of the word, but novel nonetheless. Battleship also has hands down one of the coolest color schemes. It felt oddly futuristic when playing it as a child, and I think a lot of that is simply owed to the visual design of it. It's set up in this pseudo war games type view, with bl...