Board To Death

Hey kids! Are you ready to shill out for the government? Think you've got what it takes to kill innocent people and then claim it's for national security? Then do we have the game for you! That's right, this is Project CIA: The Secret Formula. I'm not gonna pretend that this games mere existence isn't surprising, because it really truly is. I mean, most of the time board games are fantasy based, make believe, something ridiculous and over the top that is so far removed from reality that you could never imagine it coming true, like, for instance, how you can supposedly own property in Monopoly. But no, here's a game centered around a very real thing in our world. The CIA. Let's just get one thing straight right from the get go...this box is hideous. The artwork is so ugly, and the almost baby puke green color is an awful choice. Usually a board games box is often better than the game itself, but for once, we have the opposite situation here. This might in fac...

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 Launching in 1965 and originally made by Kohner Brothers for Irwin Toys (but later, like everything else, falling under Milton Bradley's enormous amazing technicolor umbrella), Trouble is - much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...