Holiday Memories: The Board Games

Given that it is the holidays and all I thought that it would be fun this week to look back at some of the favorite toys and games from my youth. I’ll be doing this on and off all week so who knows what you are going to get. To start, I’ll look at some of my favorite board games. Keep in mind that I am the fourth of five children in a highly competitive family. The only rule was if you cheat you better not get caught especially if you are proven to be cheating through the use of a mathematical proof. On to the games.



Clue: The classic game to find out who killed Mr. Boddy has a number of aspects that absolutely no one bothers to discuss. To start with the entire premise of the game is that you are locked in a house with a murderer and you go around trying to solve the crime as opposed to grabbing the revolver and barricading yourself in the conservatory with Yvette the French Maid. Secondly, on those occasions where you discover that you yourself are the murderer there is a whole host of quandaries that are avoided as you senselessly confess to the crime. Like “Why did I just spend the past half hour trying to figure out something I already knew?” and “Why don’t I now escape through the open conservatory window?” and “Why don’t I just framed Mrs. White, who no one wants to be anyway?” However, this game does provide for the wonderful moment of accusing your sister of murder. For those wondering, I was always Colonel Mustard though as an adult I’ve realized that Professor Plum is the coolest. Also, this game becomes infinitely better if someone in the family can do a Tim Curry impression.



Risk: The game that can never be won. I ended up buying a version of the game for my Commodore 64 just so I could finally win one and even that took me a month to accomplish. I was probably an adult before I realized that when other people play they do things like form alliances and work together. In our family it was every person for themselves with no niceties involved, especially for whoever had Ukraine. I did invent the “Falkland Islands Rule” in which Great Britain can attack Argentina. I was nine when I made this rule. That explains pretty much everything you ever need to know about me.



Mousetrap: If there is one game that I wanted as a kid but did not have it was Mousetrap. I don’t know what it was about, whether it was interesting or not, or if I would have lost a piece the second time I played it and thus made it completely worthless but man, I so wanted to build the thing. I still do, come to think of it.



Trouble: The only reason anyone ever played Trouble was for the little pop up bubble dice roller thingy. In fact, they probably could have saved a lot on manufacturing costs by just making that and selling it for fifteen bucks a pop.



The Game of Life: Easily my favorite game growing up. It teaches you so much about the importance of getting a good education and buying insurance. It is interesting in that while theoretically you could institute same sex marriage in the game (by assuming that all children are adopted and that everyone lives in Connecticut) it is impossible to go through life as a bachelor. So apparently my life is in violation of the rules of the game. Really this game had everything you could hope for as a kid. Cars, a spinning wheel, little hills to climb, people to place in the cars and the ability to swindle money when the banker wasn’t looking.



Trivial Pursuit: No surprise about having this game on the list. I believe that in all our years of playing the game the team of my mom and myself lost only once. She covered all the entertainment and literature questions and I covered sports, science and geography (we split on history). Also, this was great in that it created huge arguments over rule interpretations, definitions of questions, and whether or not we should let my younger brother answer questions from the children’s version or not. For some reason the children’s version had a surprising number of questions about the Mister T board game. Twenty plus years later and I still remember that.



Stratego: This game was like the counterargument to Risk where instead of conquering the world you were trying to win a battle. Why you were doing so with Napoleon’s army is another mystery for the ages. Just for once I wanted to have a tank on the battlefield. This game is essentially Capture the Flag with bombs thus allowing you to go into such strategic moves as placing one bomb behind another or the famous “switch your pieces while your brother isn’t looking” gambit.

Any board games that I missed? What other favorites are out there?