Board To Death

It's a shame that they stopped producing board games that essentially were based around a schlocky 50s b horror film, because what a gem this one truly is. Okay, so what if all the kids on the box look like they've just experienced the thrill of tasting human flesh and now hunger for it nonstop, that still makes the concept (of the game, not cannibalism) really cool!  Designed by Jeffrey Breslow and Erick Erickson - a name which has to be fake because nobody would do that to a child - and released by Mattel in 1977, "Slime Monster" follows the idea of The Slime Monster having invaded the town, and only you can stop him! You must get from the High School to the Armory, pick up a land mine and knock the Slime Monster over. But be careful that the Slime monster doesn't knock you over with his slime. Let's just get past the core issue that apparently teenagers are allowed to just wander into an armory and take as many landmines as they please. What kind of ho...

In what is possible the lamest of all the haunted house board games we've covered here lately, Ghost Castle (yeah, even the name doesn't really do much for it), is about as bland as they come when compared to the others we've looked at. Okay sure, we've only looked at two others and okay sure one of those was based on pre-existing IP (The Haunted Mansion) but still!Ghost Castle is still the most childish and least visually entertaining of them all. That isn't to say it doesn't have its good points, though, because despite its massive shortcomings design wise it still has some pros to it. Let's discuss the artwork. While it's nowhere near as visually neat as Haunted House - because it lacks an actual model - and The Haunted Mansion - because, well, it's not the Haunted Mansion, it still merits some points for the artwork within it. Even though the "castle" in this sense of the word is nothing more than painted board pieces, those painted boa...

I was a weird little girl, into some weird shit, like taxidermy, taking photos of roadkill and horror movies, and because of this I often didn't have a ton of female friends (or really many friends at all) because the stuff I liked was just too "icky" and "strange" and "dark". Because of my strange obsession with all things macabre, it's very sad that I wasn't aware of Haunted House as a child, because holy shit would I have loved it. Just look at the graphics on this box, look at that ghoulish face in the little box at the bottom, and the beautiful black and blue combination of shading on the house itself. The font, the sky and sun. This is an absolute work of art worthy of being framed and hung on a wall. And the game itself, for a change, doesn't fail to live up to the hype the box creates! At least, design wise, as I can't say from personal experience whether or not this game is fun seeing as I've never actually played it. Rele...

Mystery Date is a board game circa 1965 from the Milton Bradley company, conceived by none other than the man who's become this blogs apparent nemesis, Marvin Glass, and created by Henry Stan. A confusing contradiction, as "conceived" often means "created", so I'm not sure how to parse that exactly, but whatever. It's marketed to girls 6 to 14 years of age, and is overall a fairly popular board game in pop culture, often showing up as a trope or reference in things. Basically the object of the game is to acquire a desirable date from a group of men, all while avoiding "the dud". These men include the Formal Dance date, the Bowling Date, the Skiing Date and the Beach Date. I'm unsure what kind of climate the people in this game live in, because if you're able to go skiing, that means it's too cold to go to the beach, so unless they live in something akin to Springfield, their temperatures make no sense whatsoever. But why nitpick a g...

Operation is a sick, sick game. We gather our children around a man on a table and we tell them to pull things out of him with tweezers, things he likely still needs , things that aren't really the problem with his health. Think of like this, the healthcare system in the US is so poor, so looked down upon, so laughably bad, that we made surgery into a fucking board game. Operation was one of those games I never actually owned, but I did play it from time to time whether at after school functions or friends houses. The prototype was invented in 1964 by John Spinello, a University of Illinois Industrial Design student at the time of its creation. He later sold the rights to it to our good friend Marvin Glass for a measly (well by todays standards I suppose) 500 dollars and the promise of a job upon graduation, a promise which Glass did not uphold. I think it's safe to say at this point, given his iron grip on the industry and his rather piss poor behavior - whether it's steal...

Of all the board games I'm likely to cover on this blog, none is as weird as Mouse Trap. Oh sure, you may think Candy Land, with it's sentient candy inhabitants or even The Game of Life, where you utilize escapism to...not escape from reality, would be stranger, but Mouse Trap really is probably the single most unique board game in existence, solely because of how it was designed. It's a board game where the board is basically secondary. It's simply a thing for the rest of the game to sit on top of. Because, really, Mouse Trap is the contraption, not the board. And while the board is cool looking, no matter what variation or changes they make to it (though of course classic is always the best in most cases), I'll argue that it's still secondary to the rest of the pieces that really make up what Mouse Trap is. Created in 1963, it was one of the first mass produced three dimensional board games. Working together, players are to build a Rube Goldberg type trap, whi...