Board To Death

Hey kids! Are you ready to shill out for the government? Think you've got what it takes to kill innocent people and then claim it's for national security? Then do we have the game for you! That's right, this is Project CIA: The Secret Formula. I'm not gonna pretend that this games mere existence isn't surprising, because it really truly is. I mean, most of the time board games are fantasy based, make believe, something ridiculous and over the top that is so far removed from reality that you could never imagine it coming true, like, for instance, how you can supposedly own property in Monopoly. But no, here's a game centered around a very real thing in our world. The CIA. Let's just get one thing straight right from the get go...this box is hideous. The artwork is so ugly, and the almost baby puke green color is an awful choice. Usually a board games box is often better than the game itself, but for once, we have the opposite situation here. This might in fac

"She walked into my office, you know the type...the quiet but questionable dame, the one you show off to the boys at the club but don't bring home to mother. She told me she was in need of two things; a good detective and a stiff drink. Lucky for her both things could be found in my office." I have to admit, there aren't enough mystery type board games. Oh sure, we have "Clue", and we have...well..."Clue", but that really does run the gamut it seems like. Perhaps I'm not taking into consideration the amount of new board games that come out on the regular (and I'm not because this blog is primarily about classic board games) so maybe that niche has been somewhat filled out more, but I really like the idea of a noire styled board game, and I feel like it's a genre that really hasn't been touched on quite enough in recent years, for any sort of content, really. And it's a shame, because there's a lot you could do with it, espec

Back again to teach us the importance of stripping the world of its natural resources and creating an unsustainable business model are the minds behind Monopoly, with their new game, "Hotels". And by new, I mean it's from 1974, but I've always been of the opinion that if it's something you've never seen, then it's new to you, so. Hotels is a pretty basic and straightforward concept, overall. You construct an empire of hotels to bankrupt your opponents so you can continue your stranglehold on the market with no interference from anyone else. It's for 2-4 players, ages eight and up, and a game can run for 90 minutes. A brief description from Board Game Geeks reads as thus: Players try to buy and build the best hotels in this game, earning the most money or bankrupting their opponents. A successful hotel consists of three components: the land on which it's built, the hotel buildings, and the entrances by which guests arrive in the hotels. All three

Why is it such a shared experience we have as children that we think sharks are everywhere? When I was a little girl, I just assumed sharks were in pools, lakes, the bathtub. I was absolutely terrified of water. Was it because we all saw "Jaws" at too young an age and it made an everlasting impression on us? Whatever the case may be, it seems that kids and sharks go hand in fin, and it makes sense why a lot of kids toys are (or at least were when I was a child) shark based. But never before have I seen a shark based board game, so leave it to Milton Bradley to craft yet another inexplicable combination that shouldn't work but somehow does. Shark Attack is a board game released by Milton Bradley in 1988, designed by Eddie Goldfarb and art by Chuck Slack, two men who sound more like they're ordinary good boys who fell in with the mob through a series of comical misadventures rather than board game designers. The description of the board game is as follows: