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Don't Wake Daddy


Released in 1992 by The Parker Brothers, Don't Wake Daddy is a simple game meant for children ages 3 and up for 2-4 players. It takes about 20 minutes to play, and I remember the commercials for this very vividly. This was one of the board games that got constant commercial airtime during cartoon blocks, and because of that I have an extremely vivid memory of it playing seemingly nonstop. It's actually one of the very few board game commercials I can recall with absolute clarity, though that shouldn't be too surprising, considering how little board games were advertised after 2002.

Designed by Roger Ford (the artist remains unknown), a man who had virtually no career other than this game, it's got an extremely basic concept: players move by drawing cards and moving to the matching space. If you land on a picture-number space then you have to risk waking Daddy. Daddy is in his bed, a spring-loaded molded plastic gizmo. If you did something that might cause him to stir, you have to press the snooze button on his alarm clock a specified number of times. Daddy might sleep through it... but he might sit up suddenly and send his nightcap flying, and send the kid who woke him up back to bed.

I can imagine one particular reason this board game did as well as it did was because it was a very universal feeling among kids. I know for a fact that not just myself but the few friends I had often walked around quiet as a mouse so as not to wake their parents, either in the mornings or the evenings, especially if they were up later than they were supposed to be. I spent a lot of time being quiet for the sake of snoozing adults, and it's led me to be a very quiet person overall, a trait far too many people assume today is somehow a facet of me being a cold bitch.

It's a well made game, I'll give it that.

It's colorful, it's got good artistry and design, and it's a very basic premise, one that most kids could relate to, which makes it more succeptable to success. I love the top down view the board takes, with a path leading from the kids beds around dads bed to the fridge in the kitchen; everything has a skewed, warped almost Henry Selick sort of perspective, but with more color.

But I feel like some things need to be mentioned, because apparently this is a single dad who has 3 children. Is this some sort of sitcom scenario? Did mom die because the kids kept getting out of bed? What happened to the other half of this parental unit? And more concerning than that is the stance dad takes when he's finally woken from his slumber...

Now we know why you don't want to wake daddy. Because he's actually part of the living dead and will eat you if you do! Suddenly all the pieces fit. Just look at that pose, that's the pose of a zombie dad right there. Seriously though, I kid. Overall this is a perfectly fine game made for the right age group, with good art design and an easy to comprehend plot that makes its 3 and up age range make a lot more sense, because, sure, anyone can play this. It's as basic as Candyland.

And it isn't just the board that's designed well, or even the dad feature figure or his bed, but also the player tokens. Okay, sure, they're standard cardboard cutouts with the art on it and not an actual 3d model, but still, the art is top notch and they made sure to include two of each kid so there's equal footing for all.

Each one is given its own color, so a kid can pick their favorite, and each kids color corresponds to the color on the board, which is a neat little trick. Despite the artist being seemingly unknown and the designer not doing much beyond this, it's a pretty expertly crafted game, if I'm telling the truth. Simplicity really is the way to go for a lot of things, and I think far too many people don't realize that often enough. Parker Brothers introduced the game at the 1992 American International Toy Fair. It was picked as the sixth best toy of the year (third-best among girls) in the Duracell Kids' Choice National Toy Survey, and was one of the best-selling games of the 1992 Christmas season. But here's something you might not know!

The game served as the inspiration for a series of 1990s works by German artist Martin Kippenberger. Kippenberger used the symbols for the different "noises" in the game to plan a cycle of wood-carvings and oil paintings. A children's book based on the game, Don't Wake Daddy: Late-Night Snack, was published by Scholastic Corporation in 2001. 2001, that's almost a decade after the board game was released, which proves this sucker has legs.

They're just covered up by a blanket.

Don't Wake Daddy is a board game that I'm almost certain anyone from my age group would remember if they saw it, and likely thanks to the constant commercial rotation on kids networks, like I said before. I decided to do this one after the last few weeks of really rough board games to give us something actually fairly well made and fun to look at, and also to dive into my own nostalgia to boot. To this day, when I get up in the middle of the night - even when there's nobody else around - I am dead quiet, and I likely always will be. It's just a force of habit burned into me since adolescence, so maybe even as an adult I'd find this game appealing.

I just thank god I don't have to sneak by the snoozing undead to get a late night snack, or else I'd become the late night snack.

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