Board To Death

When I was a little girl, my stepbrother wanted to go slot car racing for his birthday one year. I wasn't a huge fan of it, but over the years I've managed to gain an appreciation for miniature models and hobbies like that, and perhaps that's where my enjoyment for things like this came from. Not that that was my only exposure to toy cars, mind you. I also had a small collection of Hot Wheels and Matchbox - which were the lesser cool console wars of the day, frankly - because, unlike other girls my age, I liked stuff like that and also my dad, on the rare occasions I saw him, gave me a lot of them. So when you match those points up with my adoration for board games, specifically the 3D modeled board games with set pieces, then what you have is something entirely unique, like Crash Canyon. Crash Canyon, published by our board game overlords Milton Bradley, was released in 1989, the very year I was born. Designed for 2 to 4 players, the description is as follows: "This o...

Dogfight is, right off the bat, presented by absolutely killer artwork. But it's also presented by a rather honest combination of words, "American Heritage". It's true, the only thing more American than fighting in a war is starting a war. It's our national past time. Baseball? Nah, fuck Baseball. War is what we here in the USofA strive for. Like Screamin' Eagles, we have yet another plane fight board game, but unlike Screamin' Eagles this one is based in World War 1 and not whenever the hell Screamin' Eagles is supposedly based. I'm gonna go ahead and say in the 80s, and the Cold War, just to make it more interesting. Released in 1962 by Milton-Bradley under their American Heritage line of the Command Decision series of board games, with art by Charles H. Hubbell, it's a 45 minute game that can have up to 4 players and, much like Screamin' Eagles two decades later, also utilizes cards because, well, it's a board game and you kind of ne...

We're finally tackling a big one here, fellas, that's right...it's Battleship! Battleship is, I'm sure, a game that anyone and everyone has likely played at least once in their life. It wasn't a game I owned growing up, sadly, not for any particular reason either we just never bought a copy. But it's certainly a game I always loved. It's also a unique game in the sense of how its set up. It's one of the rare board games where you don't get to see where the other player is, because it doesn't take place on the same board as you're on. A truly novel concept back then, certainly. Not novel enough for a terrible feature film presumably based on it in the loosest sense of the word, but novel nonetheless. Battleship also has hands down one of the coolest color schemes. It felt oddly futuristic when playing it as a child, and I think a lot of that is simply owed to the visual design of it. It's set up in this pseudo war games type view, with bl...

When I was a little girl, my stepfather took me yearly to see the Blue Angels perform tricks at a local air show. I've never been a huge fan of planes, despite traveling them on them fairly consistently when I was younger, but even I enjoyed the antics of the Blue Angels, even if now in hindsight I recognize it as nothing more than patriotic propaganda designed to make kids more trustworthy of the US government through the guise of cool plane tricks. But I try not to get too political on any of my work, because my opinion on anything outside the thing I'm covering isn't important to the thing I'm covering, so. I just wanted to give some sort of context as to why I - a 31 year old queer woman - might think something like Screamin' Eagles is not only a cool looking board game but also a great band name. Let's just state it right from the get go...the colors and artwork on this box are beyond exceptional. The font design is fantastic, and all in all this is a good ...