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Seance

Hey kids, wanna scare up Grandpa!?

This almost feels as though someone thought there needed to be a family version of a Ouija board. The same sort of idea, but without the possibilities of cursing your children to a lifetime of being harassed by ghosts and demons because of your one time usage of the device. Enter Seance! Yet another in the long line of forgotten Milton Bradley releases (at this point, this blog is really just a Milton Bradley blog, let's be honest), and also yet another shining example of "What the fuck were you thinking?"

Seance, whose designer and artist are once again uncredited, was released in 1972, and is for ages 7 and up. I'm assuming it doesn't have an age cut off partially because even the undead can participate, which is a very nice thing to do. It gets lonely in the afterlife, I'd imagine. The cover art is what it is, nothing special but nothing bad either. It's a perfectly adequate representation of a room with a spooky voice. So what is Seance about?

Well, a brief description of the game is as follows:

Players bid on dead Uncle Everett's possessions and the high bidder listens to instructions from their dead Uncle via a record (played on the record player hidden in the deck.) When all the items have been bid on and acquired, the record in the desk in turned over and Uncle Everett tells the players what each of the items is worth or how is due in taxes for the item. The player with the most cash at the end of the game is the winner. This game is a rare sequel to MB's Voice of the Mummy

So, it's not so much a Seance as it is an estate sale and your dead uncle just happens to be semi present at the time. Feel kind of duped, to be honest. Was expecting something a little more in depth and creative than the game version of ransacking your dead relatives belongings for your own monetary gain. I have to wonder...did Milton Bradley even know what a seance was, if this is what they came up with? How did nobody stop them at any point and say, "Hey guys, uh, look, I love working here and everything, but...this...this is totally inaccurate." Oh well, don't live and learn I suppose. Though there's one other thing that throws me off a bit...this is a rare sequel to their other game, Voice of the Mummy. This insinuates that your uncle was some kind of Pharaoh and you've looted his tomb for his loot and are now piecing it out amongst his surviving relatives. Is there a third game where he comes back for revenge? Cause dead or not, I'd be pretty pissed.

Okay okay, for all the joking aside, I actually do LOVE the design of this board, even if the game itself lacks any real fun to it and is nothing more than a morbid version of Monopoly. I mean, just look at this goddamned thing.

It's yet another pop up type of a board, which I'm always an enormous fan of, and this one is absolutely gorgeous. What Seance may lack in originality play wise it certainly makes up for in design. The colors, the art direction, everything about this is absolute perfection. It's also a tad weird as it's simply one room. Most of these pop up boards are entire houses or whatever, but Seance - because it all takes place in this one spot - is just the one room of Uncle Everett.

So yeah, Seance isn't actually a "seance", nor is it probably a very fun game, but goddamn if it isn't one of the most beautiful pop up boards I've covered thus far. The artistry on display here is absolutely magnificent, and I kind of just want to use this as a set of a dollhouse it's so frickin pretty. It's a real shame that the designer and artist are apparently unknown, because their work on this thing really deserves to be recognized. Though, it's not that surprising that there's no records of who worked on it. I'd imagine Milton Bradley simply had a number of designers and artists on hand, and they all were assigned to one game or another, and it all ran together. Still...I wish I could tell them how good a job they did on this board, because it's downright gorgeous.

Which is good, because it probably isn't very entertaining, but at least it's nice to look at, and really...

...that's kind of the whole point of this blog. To be visually appealing. Well done, Seance.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go loot my great grandmother's crypt. I'll see you next month.

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