Board To Death

I can't imagine a funnier scenario than coming across this in a thrift store. I didn't. That didn't happen. I just can't imagine a funnier scenario for finding a board game than that. Released in 1981 by Milton Bradley and designed by Michael Gray (once again no artist is credited that I can find but really does 'multicolored squares' count as an art design?), Bargain Hunter is perhaps the local income family version of Electronic Mall Madness. Now you live on the other side of the railroad tracks after some bad investments, and you can no longer afford the finer products in life, forcing you to do all your shopping at a thrift store. Gray is actually a fairly accomplished game designer who, ironically enough, designed Electronic Mall Madness. When I say accomplished, for the record, I just mean that he's successful. Not that the game's he's designed are decent. In fact, a majority of them appear to be novelty titles based on pre-existing IP. "T...

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...

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...

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...

Boy, growing up in the 80s/90s, as I did, if you asked where girls lived, you'd often get the response, "The mall!" because people just thought teenage girls lived and died at the mall. And while I did visit the mall a lot as an adolescent, I assure you it wasn't to take advantage of THESE GREAT LOW PRICED DEALS! It was more to either buy a book now and then, or escape my family, and often much more the second than the first. It wasn't about social interaction or spending money, it was about having the chance to actually get out of the house and away from the people who constantly wanted to hurt me. So to make a board game based on a mall, something that, these days, seems to sort of be in its death throes, is a pretty great concept that I'm all for. Even as much of a stereotype as "girls love the mall" might have become, let me tell you, as someone who was once a teenage girl, it's 100% true. See a stereotype is a stereotype often because they...

When I was a little girl, I went to the horse races a lot. I had a great aunt who went a lot, and she took me along with her quite often, and I really enjoyed it. I like gambling, I like horses, so it was a nice mesh of things I enjoyed to make one thing I really enjoyed. Despite having not been to the horse races for years now, sadly, I still enjoy it and would like to go back some day. But you know what's even cooler? Bringing the horse races to you! In 1975, MPH Games Co released a "board game" titled "Across The Board: Horse Racing Game", and the reason why board game is in quotations will become clear enough very very soon. This is going to be somewhat of a weird post, but please bare with me. Across The Board is technically a board game. If you looked at its packaging, it wouldn't look out of place whatsoever on the shelf next to Monopoly. But it actually doesn't have a board. Hell, it even says on the front of the box "as advertised in Reader...

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...

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...

    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 ...