Board To Death

Released in 1992 by The Parker Brothers, Don't Wake Daddy is a simple game meant for children ages 3 and up for 2-4 players. It takes about 20 minutes to play, and I remember the commercials for this very vividly. This was one of the board games that got constant commercial airtime during cartoon blocks, and because of that I have an extremely vivid memory of it playing seemingly nonstop. It's actually one of the very few board game commercials I can recall with absolute clarity, though that shouldn't be too surprising, considering how little board games were advertised after 2002. Designed by Roger Ford (the artist remains unknown), a man who had virtually no career other than this game, it's got an extremely basic concept: players move by drawing cards and moving to the matching space. If you land on a picture-number space then you have to risk waking Daddy. Daddy is in his bed, a spring-loaded molded plastic gizmo. If you did something that might cause him to s...

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 ...

  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 ...