Board To Death

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...

Board games sort of suffered the same fate of movies in the sense that after years of being readily available and considered classics, they underwent a "remake" that was often nowhere near as cool. In board games sense, these often meant updating them for the modern era and making them electronic. Once electronic toys hit the market, board games had to do something to compete, so why not drag out old IP - one which perhaps the kids parents remember fondly so they'll be more inclined to buy it for their children - and redo it with electronics so it appeals to the newer generation? Easy money, baby. So, here we are, back again the seemingly unending well of "creepy building" board games. Between Ghost Castle , Haunted House and Haunted Mansion , I swear, as big a plethora of these exist as crappy B horror movies exist. It's ridiculous. In fact, I could probably just cover nothing but creepy building board games for the rest of this blogs lifespan and still ne...

If ever there were a game that was somehow simultaneously super famous and yet not famous, it's Clue. Despite having, just like Monopoly, a million versions published all because each IP that exists demands their own, despite having a goddamned feature film, despite having a whole ass musical and despite being one of the most famous board games of all time...it also has surprisingly little relevancy in the modern world. Maybe it's just because of the slow death of the "mystery" genre, when it isn't a mystery wrapped inside another genre, like science fiction. Nobody reads mystery books anymore, and outside of Knives Out - which, in all fairness was almost a parody more than it was an homage, not that I say that as an insult - there's no mystery movies anymore. Sure, Columbo has made a comeback during these uncertain times, but there's not really anything modern that's pure mystery as far as television goes, and especially nobody attends weekend murder ...

One of the board games I never understood the popularity of was The Game Of Life. Perhaps, if you grow up in a healthy, well functioning, non abusive family then the game takes on different connotations and becomes simply something you can do to pass the time. But for someone like me, who grew up in a unhealthy poorly functioning abusive family, the game becomes a swift kick to the crotch about how much better your board game life is to your actual life, and how depressing that can be. It was almost as if your leisure activity were laughing directly at you for not being capable of achieving the things everyone else seemed capable of achieving, like having a family or going to college or even getting a job. To be fair, I never played The Game Of Life all that much. I wanna say we owned a copy, but I'm not even sure that that's true. Or if we did, we simply didn't play it a whole lot. I think part of the problem is that, as a kid, the game seems too far away and uninteresting...

Sorry is actually another game I did play a lot as a kid. It's not something I remember super dearly or anything, I just have these very distinct memories of having played it as a child. There's not really much to it, visually, that makes it all that interesting, either. It's a very simple board design, the pieces look like deformed chess pawns and overall it's just rather meh in its look. Let's start off this blog post with a fun fact, which is Sorry actually originated from the UK, and it makes sense, doesn't it? Only the UK would have a game with an apologetic polite word for its title. I'm gonna be frank with you guys, there's not a whole lot to discuss here. It's a fairly straight forward game, it's not very interesting visually and it's not got a very in depth history to it. The colors of the board and pieces all work really well together, I'll give it that much. Red, Teal, Yellow and Blue all somehow work, and I think it's beca...

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...

Trouble is one of the oldest board game memories that I have. I don't have a lot of good memories growing up, but, before my mother remarried, we did spend a lot of time together in relatively good ways and one of those ways was playing Trouble. I think we went to Toys R Us and decided which board game to pick out, and I think we settled on Trouble because we often felt like we were so close to being in trouble ourselves all the time. It really just seemed very appropriate at the time. Launching in 1965 and originally made by Kohner Brothers for Irwin Toys (but later, like everything else, falling under Milton Bradley's enormous amazing technicolor umbrella), Trouble is - much like Candy Land - an extremely simple game. You simply need to move the pieces around the board while rolling your dice in the pop-o-matic, a concept that honestly I'm surprised I've only ever seen in Trouble, as it's extremely easy to lose dice and cheat with dice. With the pop-o-matic device...

  Candy Land is considered a classic, and for good, albeit somewhat confusing, reasons. Despite being easily the most "child accessible" board game there is, Candy Land was not a game that I played all that much. I remember playing it from time to time, but those memories are extremely vague and it certainly wasn't a board game that got played anywhere near as much as the others from my closet as I got older. But it's considered a child accessible game because there's simply not much strategy or difficulty to it whatsoever; players are never required to make any choices and instead just follow directions, and the winner is ultimately predetermined by the shuffle of the cards. But what if I were to tell you that Candy Land has undergone massive changes, thusly creating lore and almost having a feature film based off of it? Remember a few years ago when we started to hear news about feature films being based off board games? There was talk of a Monopoly movie, and B...

    One of the best board games I can remember playing as a child is Pay Day.   I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that a lot of board games were simply economic learning tools disguised as games to teach children how to properly manage money. This theory can be backed up somewhat by the sheer number of board games involved with handling money. Between Pay Day, Monopoly, The Game Of Life (that one I think is just a dead giveaway considering the title), and a lot of other more obscure games like Big Money, Easy Money, Allowance, Shopping Spree and a game literally just called Budget, because why try and hide something that obvious I suppose, it's pretty cut and dry, to me at least, that that's what some of these were aiming for. And while education and entertainment have long since been intertwined - Schoolhouse Rock, anyone? - this doesn't really come as a shock, but I will admit...playing these board games didn't teach me a goddamned thing about money management. I ...