Beware The Spider!

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 its allocated position over a small hole, which contains a small mechanical lever type apparatus inside. Each turn, players attempt to remove a critter from the web with a pronged device which is connected to the board with a wire. If the surface of the web is touched with this device, the circuit is completed, and the mechanism in the hole beneath the spider is activated, thusly launching the spider. If the spider is disturbed, then the player who did the act of disturbance must return the critter they were attempting to nab back to the web. The player who collects the most critters from the web without disturbing the spider is the winner.

Extremely basic. It's actually almost exactly like Operation, if you think about it. Just a very delicate, somewhat tense procedure of removing things without touching something else. A sort of insectoid Jenga, if you will. I for one love this idea, just in general. Whoever came up with this is a genius in my book.

It's an extremely basic layout, there's really nothing to it, and yet it revels in its simplicity. Okay sure, there's also nothing truly fantastic about it, design wise, but the concept is so neat that I'm willing to let that slide a bit. I mean okay, the critters captured on the web appear to be single colored plastic molds, and range anywhere from bat to scorpion to, I don't know, a lobster? I can't really tell what that black one is meant to be; and while one can argue that bats and scorpions and lobsters especially would never be caught in a spider web, I like to imagine that perhaps this is one of those enormous spiders in fantasy epics that can catch anything simply because of its monstrous size and unquenchable appetite.

Hell, even the little prong thing they give you to pick the critters up with look stupid, like a baby fork you give a 4 year old. I mean, sure, Operation just used what essentially boiled down to a pair of tweezers, but still, that made some sense because operating tools are required to be precise. There was some leeway here. But this trident looking thing? Why are we stealing these critters, to eat them ourselves? Gross.

Either way, it's all bland visually, there's no denying it. Orangish red base with a basic spider web in the center and absolutely generic looking creatures to boot, lacking any sort of identification markers beyond just their shape, and judging by the fact that I can't tell if that's a lobster or not kind of proves even their shape doesn't work all that well. The spider itself seems to be the most interesting thing here, except, and you may have noticed this, this is not the spider present on the front of the OG box I included at the start of this post. No. Scroll back up and look at that spider for a second. I'm supposed to be afraid of that fucking thing? That candy corn ass lookin' sponge leg havin' idiot? Get real. At least this spider, which is from another release of the game by Ideal in the 80s, looks like a goddamned spider.

And, absolutely in no way do I say this in a mean way towards Milton-Bradley, but this box from Ideal kicks ass KINDS of ass. That other box is standard Milton-Bradley. Two goofy lookin' kids playing a goofy lookin' game, and even the title font - while not outright awful - looks more like deflating party balloons than anything remotely spooky.

But this thing?

Ohhhh man. At least this spider looks somewhat menacing, and the kids actually looked remotely surprised at this thing coming at them, instead of the other kids looking somewhat overjoyed to have a spider launched at their face. Also the title font, the coloring, everything about this box art is just gorgeous and reminds me of a sort of Tales From The Crypt cover. I absolutely love it.

Same poor game design, but hey, at least they gave the box art a real nice shiny update, and that's good enough for me. And really, I may talk down about the design of the thing, but really in the end, so long as something is fun, I'm willing to look past its visual unpleasantness because, much like graphics in a video game, after the first 5 minutes I'm not even going to notice if I'm simply enjoying playing it so much.

Beware The Spider seems to be a rather forgotten title, even for a Milton-Bradley game, but when you're a company as large as they are, and you churn out as much as they do year after year, it's inevitable that some titles will get lost in the shuffle over time, especially if they aren't enduring classics or cult hits. Beware The Spider is funny, sure, but it's not really anything particularly special. It's a board game that's already existing on another board games mechanics, and while I like the idea of a spider flinging itself at a childs unsuspecting face, I can see why this maybe didn't catch on. It just....doesn't have enough really going for it. It's not very well designed, it's not totally original and there's simply better board games out there.

But that doesn't mean it deserves to be wholly forgotten. I do these blogs that I do because I believe in the preservation and knowledge of art that exists in the world, even if it isn't popular art. Be it board games, halloween masks, random toys or vhs boxes, I think these things meant enough to someone to be created and that alone warrants us remembering them from time to time, and perhaps even appreciating their existence.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go throw a handful of spiders at a kindergarten class.