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When I was a child, weekends spent indoors would often culminated in a boardgame of some description. As well as carrier bags, a hoover and some dressing-up costumes, the cupboard under the stairs contained a smorgasbord of Waddington’s, Parker Bros and MBs finest (all part of Hasbro now according to Wikipedia) – Monopoly, Cluedo, Downfall, Connect 4, Mouse Trap, Totopoly et al.

What board games did you enjoy as a child, or which ones do you continue to play?

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Comments

    • I enjoy playing Scrabble with Mrs M because she’s gentle with me. Playing it with anyone else is a dispiriting experience as it exposes me as very slow and a bit thick. A bit like the rest of my life really.

    • Agreed: Scrabble and Triv are the best; Pictionary is good too. What’s that one you play in pairs where you have to guess the person/thing that your partner describes, but they are banned from using certain words on a card?

      When growing up we played all sorts, Monopoly especially. Also Yahtze (sp?) My Dad was fiercely competitive though as well as a shocking cheat so board games were a source of high tension.

      But it made me horribly competitive (and in the case of Monopoly, a ruthless, grasping capitalist) and so I don’t play now as it’s not good for my health, and worse for the people playing against me. (Love, love, love Scrabble though.)

    • According to Lance in The Detectorists, every charity shop in the entire land has a game of Kerplunk for sale. Dirt cheap because they cannot shift ’em.

  5. We’ve gone back to playing Monopoly. Loved it as a kid and then didn’t play it for 20 years or so.

    I’ll tell you this – it’s a whole different game with drink taken!

    Also Trivial Pursuit is fun. I was going to ask if there was a proper ‘hard’ version available any more, but I see that there is including a ‘retro looking gameboard’, which I presume is just the one we all know and love, seven spaces between wedges, two roll agains per seven, and six to the middle.

    I might have to buy that…

      • That’s what we had back in the day. My mam and dad bought it on behalf of my aunt who wanted to give it to *her* daughter. There was a mix up, two were bought and we ended up with the Genus edition, Horn Abbott logo’n’all on it.

        It’s long gone now, and I suspect some of the questions simply wouldn’t work today because what was Trivia in the 80’s might be just silly now, and that’s before we get to the Geography.
        In any event, as kids, we were too young to really enjoy it and so the following Christmas, we got the Childrens edition, which was identical apart from the baby blue/black packaging.

  6. The grandson (10) quite likes to play Cluedo and Yahtzee.
    He plays cribbage too, and can play it quite well without any help at all thankyou, which is one of my proudest achievements.
    I’m determined to teach him chess this year.

  7. A few others I can remember playing:

    Concorde – a bit like Monopoly, but involved buying and selling flights on Concorde. As well as your normal playing piece, there was a second one in the shape of the aircraft that moved around the centre of the board.

    Abandon Ship – rescue passengers from their cabins, and then transport them with food and water via lifeboat to the rescue ship. The novelty factor was a two piece board, one featuring the inside the of ship, the other the ocean and assorted items, and the first pivoted, gradually hiding the inside of the ship under the horizon.

    Scream Inn – move around a haunted house dodging your opponents ghosts. Ghosts hid in compartments under some of the board squares, which could be rotated to move under other board squares. A typical cheap game from Denys Fisher – the instructions were printed inside the box lid – but unlike most Fisher games it wasn’t a TV show license.

    And speaking of Denys Fisher, I came across this blog post this morning, detailing some of their odder board games. http://timworthington.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/a-fast-exciting-all-action-game.html

  8. Younger days Mousetrap, Buckaroo, Monopoly, Cluedo.

    Later Trivial Pursuits and Pictionary.

    Also remember my dad and uncle playing cribbage and dominos and letting me join in from time to time.

  10. Risk, five people playing. Build your armies up slowly, no silly risks (?), win a few minor battles, lose a few minor battles. When the time is right (when Player 2 and Player 3 have exhausted themselves) it’s your time. Using Kamchatka as your base spread west and east like Genghis Khan on speed. Victory, crushing victory, the world belongs to me!
    Those winter nights in Aberdeen were very long let me tell you

  11. I still have my Monopoly, Totopoly, Buccaneer, Formula 1, Scoop, Cluedo from the 50s/early 60s. Cluedo is a favourite at Christmas…winds my sister right up as she can never get it.

    Scrabble and Triv are newer favourites and we like Rummikub and Articulate too. A new discovery is Upwords – Scrabble fans would like it.

    Not a board game, but does anyone else play Pit..?

    • Scoop was a fun game as a kid. All about running a newspaper (pre-Murdoch).
      Anyone interested in adult board games should have a look at Cards Against Humanity. Not for the easily offended.

    • I’m curious what your Monopoly set is like. My parents had a set which came in a box about 10” Square, probably bought in the late 50s. The board was separate, too big for the box and the houses were wooden. The player pieces were a blue train, gold ship, red car, grey motorbike, yellow bulldozer, green tank. My father got rid of loads of stuff when he downsized so I don’t think he has it any more.

    • Buccaneer, now that’s a blast from the past!

      When I was young we lived in a house that a few generations of our family had lived. It was a relatively large house with cupboards all over the place and a large attic where my uncle stayed with us until he had finished college. He was a 60’s child, being 10 years younger than my dad, so when he left in around 1975 to move to North Yorkshire he left loads of stuff behind, all his board games, comics, annuals, all sorts. The house was a bit like an Aladdin’s cave to me and my little sister. So we grew up with loads of board games. My favourites were Monopoly, Totopoly and Risk.

      Incidentally, some years later the same uncle gave me a monopoly game he’d modified. By now he was living in Robin Hood’s Bay and he changed all the street names to streets in the Bay, and the four stations became the four pubs in the village. He even changed the Community Chest and Chance cards to make them more relevant to a fishing village. 10-15 years later and all these variations on Monopoly started popping up in the shops. If only he’d have flogged his idea to them first. The family name is Waddington too, although nothing to do with the game makers.

      In fact, that’s a sign that board games are a thing of the past, as whenever I used to give my surname I always got asked “like the board games?”, but I haven’t been asked that for ages!

      When we got a little older our favourite game was Escape From Colditz. I have fond memories of us all gathering round the table at my Nan’s in Robin Hoods Bay playing it in the 80’s. Nowadays the most popular game we play with our kids is Yahtzee. My wife doesn’t like playing games, so it usually tends to be me and the kids. I can never get the family to play Trivial Pursuit with me though, cos I tend to win too easily. We’ve got some great sets too – 80s, Music and the Beatles version, although that is American, which makes some of the questions difficult because the questions are based on the US albums and singles.

      We love playing Scatagories and Articulate too. We have the kids version of the latter to make it easier for the kids, although it took our son a little time to get used to it. I remember one of his first clues being “he’s fantastic and he’s a fox!”

  12. As a child we played mainly cards, above all Cribbage. But also a fantastic racing board game called Hare and Tortoise. I think fairly obscure.

    As adults, we found Perudo as twenty somethings and it is just the best best game to play while having a wee dram or three. Again, vicious.

    • My sister and I played the Game of Life an awful lot one summer. It got quite repetitive after a while, and I used to sing “nothing ever happens in the Game of Life” to the tune of Kinky Boots. Kept playing it though – think we needed more players.

      Interestingly her and my kids ended up playing it at a family meet up a few months back. They really enjoyed it!

    • Yes. We discovered this a couple of years ago and we all became mildly obsessed for a time. Even I won a few games and I am a jellyhead of the first water. Normally I’m the last to spot patterns and links

    • We got into Rummikub pre-kids, but after a while my wife refused to play because I always won (and I’m not all that competitive). The kids are old enough to play it now, so I’m going to dust it off and see how they take to it.

  15. Captain Howdy is insisting quite forcefully that I mention all the harmless fun we used to share of an evening playing with a Ouija board.
    The time and every object in the room used to just fly by.

  17. My board game career can be divided into four distinct eras.

    1. Chess – The game of kings. Played obsessively from age 7 to about 10, developed an unhealthy obsession with Bobby Fischer, spent many a Saturday at chess tournaments, won a few national competitions, played competitively against adults, yadda yadda yadda. Still the greatest board game of them all by an absolute country mile, and I still play when I can (although I’m absolutely nowhere near as good as once I was). Highlight was my school Chess team (THAT’s how middle class we were) being invited to stay in a posh hotel in Central London for the final of a chess tournament we were involved in. Badly under-supervised, we stayed up until 4am the night before the games, riding the lifts up and down and generally irritating the crap out of the other guests. Capped it all off by ringing my Dad at home at 3am to let him know that I was still awake and having a great time. He was too groggy to tell me off, just went “that’s good – see you tomorrow night”. I remain enough of a Chess nerd that for my 30th birthday I fulfilled my long term dream of travelling to Reykjavik and standing in the room where Fischer beat Spassky. Goosebumps.

    2. Games workshop – Very very into table top games from age 8 to 12. Mainly Bloodbowl and Space Marine. Collected (and painted! badly!) the figurines, bought the magazines, coveted the Bolt Thrower albums, the works. Absolute catnip for the ladies, let me tell you.

    3. The Risk Years – Mainly at university and in my early 20s. We played a sick variant where you were allowed to ask other players to leave the room with you to make secret pacts. It was annoying by design and lead to terrible betrayals and heated arguments. My very favourite Risk memory is playing a long, drawn out game over a couple of days in the back room of a bar in Buenos Aires, and the son of the Australian ambassador to Argentina (who we’d somehow fallen in with – he was a maniac) being informed he was being attacked in Australasia and breaking off conversation with a couple of girls he was attempting to chat up with the line “Excuse me ladies, I have to defend the motherland”. Great days, so they were.

    4. Present day – Occasional dabbling with the new wave of table top games. Pandemic, Settlers of Catan, Bloodborne, etc. Sadly, I don’t get to see my other mates who are into it all that often, but it’s great fun when I do.

    • Same here. Apart from 2 and 4.

      Plymouth Chess congress was hosted by my school, and run by my maths teacher, hence a plummeting envelopment in the Chess world from the age of 11 to about 17, when girls took over my prime directive.

      Risk took over the idle moments, and as you say, the vanilla game is somewhat lacking, so we introduced fairly complex rules about being able to retreat into occupied neighbouring territory and keep your armies until there was nowhere left to retreat, whereupon a huge dice-driven nuclear annihilation event proceeded, and both protagonists could be relied upon to blow several sets’ worth of armies on a massive showdown battle. And all soundtracked by King Crimson, The Mahavishnus, The Moodies, Camel, Caravan, Camel, Carlos Santana…..

    • There was a Warhammer craze among my friendship group in about Year 7/8. I had lots of figurines, the 40k game book (mad), paints galore and even a few stupid-sided dice.

      I’m not sure I ever played more than one game. I liked the painting part, but god the game was boring.

      • From memory, Bloodbowl worked well as a game (as did its sequel, Dungeonbowl), but most of the rest was indeed exceedingly dull.

        Think I coveted a Warhammer 40k set for years without every laying hands on one. That’s this weekend sorted then.

    • Another up for Settlers of Catan. There was a great article in Wired magazine about games, and how Monopoly is actually quite hopeless in that once you start to lose you can’t really come back. Settlers was their prime example of a game where everyone is involved on every turn, and it can swing back and forth quite a lot at any time. The basic game is quite light, and you can get it over with in 30-45 mins, but the expansion packs can make things heavy going. We had one game that managed to get into a stalemate that couldn’t be resolved. All the fun of a drawn test match after an hour and a half.

      We also like Continuo, which was great when the kids were younger and couldn’t draw or spell particularly well but were great at spotting patterns. Certainly helped teach them to count.

      Quirkle is a good one too, another patterns game with shades of Scrabble, pulling pieces from the bag. My then-6 year old beat the adults the first 2 or 3 games out till everyone started figuring out workable strategies. Another good counting exercise.

  18. Mastermind was another weird 70s/80s game we had in the house when I was a kid. Nothing to do with Magnus Magnusson – the box was small and rectangular, about 4” by 9”, and had a photo of a sandy-bearded chap in a Nehru suit sitting in a big office chair with an Oriental Lovely standing at his side. I think it was supposed to give a Bond villain type vibe but the bloke actually looked like a bit of a sex pest.

    The game involved trying to guess what colour pegs your opponent had hidden behind a little angled screen. Basically it was Battleship with delusions of sophistication.

  19. As a kid, we played a lot of cards games as a family. We played a game similar to Uno called Twizzle which used to packs of cards and had increasingly more complex rules. There was also Rummy and Cribbage. Learned Bridge later in life – left me cold.

    We also had a Waddingtons version of Yahtzee called “Click” – 5 dice and 4 plastic wipe off cards for keeping score. My parents would roll around laughing when someone announced they’d have to scratch their Click after yet another duff throw. Little did I know then.

    Monopoly was a bit dull, and Buccaneer looked more fun to play than it actually was. The adverts for Operation and Kerplunk looked great, but I didn’t know anyone who had them. Crossfire was totally ace, albeit hard on the fingers (BUT YOU HAVE TO RELOAD!!!!). A mate had a game called Wembley – we played endlessly. Hated Cluedo and yearned for Totopoly until I got it then thought it was dull.

    In more recent years I’ve enjoyed Scattergories. Someone bought Pandemic last Xmas- it seemed to last forever and required endless debate. I got off my face on gin so my perspective may be off.

    • In my sixth form and college days we played bridge more or less constantly when we were hanging out in coffee bars. We didn’t play to a high standard – no rubbers or bidding systems, just one hand at a time – but it made a pleasant way to pass a lazy afternoon when everyone was of the same level and no one took it too seriously.

  21. My friend is into the new wave of boardgames, the sort that get discussed on Boardgamegeek.com, and recommends them based on how family friendly they are. Mostly I’ve found them a bit disappointing: over-complicated, poorly written instructions, not especially immersive or compelling. With two notable exceptions: King Of Tokyo and Carcassone. The latter, in particular, is brilliant.

    • Another up for Carcassonne, though my brother has got all the extension packs and it really does over-complicate things. The basic game is truly brilliant, very good for people who don’t like uber-competitive games.

  22. My brother used to play American Civil War re-enactment games. He had/has hundreds, if not thousands, of lead soldiers which he hand painted with all the correct uniforms. It’s amazing he ever got married.

  23. Monopoly and Scrabble were the hits in my chubby youth. I still enjoy a good go at them.

    Remarkably I played Cluedo for the first time ever last Christmas, having bought one for the daughter. Quite good!

    The chart-topper of the moment is ‘Farkel’. Which is a dice game the aim of which is to be the first to amass a score of 10000 points. There are, obviously, constraints to this and you’re forced to take chances to build your score. Certain dice combinations score more than others, plus you have to roll one or both of the two key numbers each go to continue.

    ‘Frustation’ can fuck off. I don’t recall ever winning at it.

    • As a kid – only Scrabble with my Mam. (Only child and all that)
      As a teenager, chess with my friend while listening to his older brothers vinyl – happy days.
      Now Cluedo at Christmas. But we sometimes have language students stay with us for a week at a time during the summer and the American game Blokus is a big hit. No language barriers once the concept is understood. Russian girls are especially competitive – look out in a few years when they take over. Headbandz is also good for English language students.

  24. Does anybody remember a football themed game endorsed by Emlyn Hughes? I can’t remember if it was a board game or a early console game, but it definitely had his image on the front.

  26. In the mid seventies when we should have been outside doing something much more healthy, my friend and I used to spend hours playing the London Cabbie game, which involved picking up fares and moving a plastic taxi around a map of London. The blurb on the box boasted that it was almost like driving a cab for real – which it was, apart from the fact that it took place on a large piece of cardboard instead of on the streets of That London, and didn’t actually involve driving a vehicle or pontificating about politics, and being rude to fare paying passengers. It was fairly mindless, but utterly absorbing. Happy days.

  27. Does anyone else remember the board game Poleconomy from the early 1980s? You bought and sold companies, with players taking turns to be Prime Minister. The board contained adverts for various companies amongst the two concentric squares of spaces along which the player could move. There was also a row of numbered squares with their own arrowed counter which denoted the inflation rate – simply a multiplier used in all financial transactions – and the Prime Minister’s only power was to dictate which direction this arrow pointed in.

    In the UK at least the game was sold only through mail-order via a TV advertisement, which probably indicates why there was an advert on the board for Tellydisc (“And remember, this record is not available in the shops!”).

    The family acquired a copy at the time, but we probably only played it twice at most, as it was exceedingly dull.

  28. Any votes for Escape From Colditz? We would play this game for HOURS at my mates house. Later on at college we were obsessed for a while with the Games Workshop game Talisman.

    • Colditz was daft – you’d spend hours collecting wire cutters, false uniforms and Papieren and just as you were about to launch an escape the person playing the Commandant would play the ‘Apell” card and you’d have to start all over again.

  29. Three categories I recall:

    1 was basically the MB range: Usually the two player quick-ish game you played with your mates: Connect 4, Downfall, Battleship, Stay Alive and, especially, Operation. I have modern versions of most i play with my kids.

    2 was the category of family games for Sunday afternoon which could be played with parents and younger sis. Cluedo was king followed closely by Great Game of Britain.
    Others were Yahtzee and Ratrace (monopoly esque social climbing) and aforementioned Scoop.

    Third was Strategy games: Risk, Strategy which were generally with the old man.

  30. Connect 4 and Keplunk filled many a young Christmas.
    Mouse Trap always took too long to set up.

    TV endorsed Board Games came in the 80s – Family Fortunes and Mike Read’s Pop Quiz are two I remember (there wasn’t too much actual Quiz in that one until the end).

    Triv, Scrabble and Monopoly were ever present.

    Apart from those 3 (and about 200 packs of cards), the only ones that get out regulalry chez Digit are:
    Cranium – Triv, Pictionary, Charades and plasticine modelling all in one box

    and

    Articulate – one person describes stuff, and you just shout out random answers in the hope of matching a word on the card

    How about an Only Connect Board Game (with free inflatable Victoria Coren-Mitchell)?

  31. At art school we got a bit obsessed with a game called Movie Maker, essentially a monopoly style game where instead of collecting properties you built up the assets you needed for a film, leading actor & actress, director, story and location units. Different genres of film we’re worth more than others – horror films were pretty cheap to make, epics needed more expensive actors & directors and more location units. When you had a film you collected a percentage of its cost every time you passed go (box office) but it could flop, win oscars, etc. Distribution deals are also involved.

    Lost the original set many years ago and have been keeping an eye out in charity shops for ages to no avail. Decent complete games go for about £60 – £80 on eBay nowadays.

  32. Cluedo, Risk, Ker Plunk, Chess and many others mentioned above.

    Then Backgammon with which I remain obsessed. The best game of luck, chance and strategy bar none. Surprised it’s not been mentioned already.

    • I became obsessed with the backgammon game that came with Windows several years ago, where you could play random people around the world. I became really good at it. I must get the kids into it, as it’s a great game to teach them probability, which is what it’s all about after all.

      • Hey, another Backgammoner.

        The ‘probability’ element is an interesting one and, as far as I am aware, reflects the probability of dice throws, i.e. the probability of combinations.

        However, I think the ‘probabilities’ specific to this game assume one moving as far around the board as one can, given their throw.

        The amazing thing about this game, in my mind, is how the player ‘positions’ themselves, given that one can throw absolutely shite dice, but move tactically (and sometimes painfully slowly) and still win the game.

        It is of course a ‘gambling’ game, but it’s similarity to the mindset needed for ‘Risk’ is remarkable.

        • Any gambles you take should be based on probability though, as some gambles are more likely to succeed than others, when you are talking about the throwing of two dice, as there is a finite set of outcomes from the dice. You basically need to work out what the probability is of your opponent being able to bugger up your plan with their next roll!

          Of course, there is always the chance that the opponent throws the dice in such a way that he can bugger up your plan, but doesn’t do it because they are simply trying to move a piece as far round the board as they can with no probability-based strategy. A player who is good with probability (and a good knowledge of how to play backgammon of course) should pretty much always beat someone who doesn’t understand or apply probability, even with a few lucky/unlucky rolls going against him. This is basically the ‘positioning’ that you mention.

          Most players who play backgammon regularly, however, will be using probability to some degree, even if they don’t know they are doing it.

  34. Boggle, Scrabble (family rules – 8 letters first go, blanks get recycled, 3 letters the same can be replaced), Monopoly (invented by an American Quaker), Cluedo (making complicated logic problem-style grids on the back of the sheet to work out what cards everyone hasn’t got), Risk (I now play Dice Wars online for the same hit), chess (until I was finally able to beat my dad, then I stopped), Taxi (at Christmas with grandparents in East London – really living city life).

    Ones not mentioned – Rat Race (acquiring consumer goods to rise up in society – invaluable life lessons), Peter Rabbit’s Race Game (just really long paths round a board with Beatrix Potter figures), Dungeons and Dragons (a lot of paperwork for characters getting killed by ochre jelly and liches).

    The big family game is 500 – a whist-style card game, but it’s only my parents and sister and me who ever play that now.

    My older daughter likes draughts and the younger one likes Uno, so there’s hope for the next generation.

    • Yes, that was one of the games we had knocking about the house when I was younger. Don’t think I ever learned how to play that properly though. This thread is great. It’s bringing back so many memories. I had completely forgotten about the existence of Buccaneer and Spy Ring until a few moments ago!

  36. This may be a long shot, but does anyone else know and/or love the board game The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (not the book, I mean the board game based on the book)? Invented by Steve Jackson of Fighting Fantasy fame, it was from the Ganes Workshop stable of games, but self-contained (no daft expansion packs etc), stripped down and utterly playable.

    I think it could be the perfect fantasy board game. Fast moving, really easy to grasp. You chose a character and tore through a dungeon, meeting a variety of monsters on the way. Elements like the Cluedo-style treasure chest key puzzle and the random maze were ingenious. Beautifully designed as well.

  37. I’m a huge boardgame nut and have several hundred of them. This is truly the golden age of boardgaming in terms of design and production: the number of great games released each year is huge and the ingenuity of game mechanisms is staggering. 90% of the games mentioned above would be classified as old-school Party Games, meaning low rule complexity, high player counts and limited strategic choices. Even this space, the populist end of board gaming, has a ton of great games. Try Codenames, One-Night Werewolf or Dixit. If you are even slightly interested in diving deeper, I’d strongly recommend heading to Boardgamegeek (the Geek) and reading one of the hundreds of theads on Gateway games. This era to boardgames is what the 60s was to music.

  38. Don’t think anyone has mentioned my two childhood favourites. Formula One was, as its name suggests, a car racing game involving use of a cardboard dashboard in which you chose your speed, risking spinning off at corners if you went too fast. And Wembley involved each player getting the cards of a number of football league clubs and trying to win the FA Cup agoanst the other players’ teams.

    These days the two Christmas family standbys are Articulate and Scattegories though they’re both parlour games really rather than board games in the true sense.

        • Any defenders (no pun intended) of Subbuteo? I was really crap, wasn’t it? No wonder kids think games on screens are so much better than a lot of the stuff which we had which came in cardboard boxes kept on the top of the wardrobe. They’re right.

          • What?? Subbuteo kept us going through many a rain-filled Scottish ‘summer’. At Jim’s we played on a small coffee table, easy to score a goal from your own penalty area but equally easy to concede, 23 goal thrillers were not uncommon. At Cliff’s (Cliff being posh) he had the full-size official pitch. It took a long time to get from one end to the other, dull 1-0 games were not uncommon.
            At mine we played on the ancient Axminster rug. Allowances had to be made for the bare patches, the burn marks from Dad’s fags and that strange stained area where that infamous incident involving our dog and a half-full bottle of advocaat occurred.
            Endless tournaments, endless arguments ( “call that a flick you cheatin’ wee bastard?”) and a World Cup where Scotland, having thrashed England 17-0 in the semis because nobody wanted to be England, triumphed over 7-man Brazil – the referee was having none of that South American trickery thank you very much, Pele being carried off in the 3rd minute after Billy Bremner’s waist-high tackle removed him from his plastic base.
            Crap? How dare you, sir!

            • I don’t know about anyone else but I’m always up to hear more of a story that involves the words “our dog”, “stained area” and “half-full bottle of advocaat”.

              • Willie Mathers – “Your parents are out, where’s the drinks cupboard?” Several bottles are opened and sniffed. Whisky is disgusting as is vodka. “That’s nae bad” and we commence to sip the advocaat. Ten minutes later two eleven year old lads are giggling helplessly. I feel a bit dizzy and go outside for some fresh air.
                I re-enter to find Willie with his arm around our dog, Timmy. Timmy is lapping advocaat from a bowl. Timmy seems very happy. Another ten minutes and Timmy is not so happy. He gets up, staggers for a bit then vomits up the advocaat, this morning’s breakfast and that marrow-bone he got from next door.
                Willie weaves his way home. I tie a scarf round my nose and begin cleaning up. My job is made no easier by me adding to the pile of sick with my own.
                “Hello, Mum. Did you have a nice time? Why are you taking off your belt, Dad?”
                For years after if a stray ray of afternoon sunshine traversed the Axminster the faint aroma of advocaat and dog sick made its unwelcome return.

          • Subbuteo was OK, but my football game of choice would be the one where you banged down on the players head to shoot the ball, which allowed for many blistering top corner screamers. I want to say it was called Score? Anyone else remember this one?

        • I had Subbueto too, but found it hard going so adapted it so that I could just place players behind the ball. I was far more interested in team selection and the creation of leagues and tournaments. A mate of mine had a game called 4-2-4 which had playes mounted on little wedges of plastic. We played for hours.

          I tried Subbueto Rugby too. It was pants.

          • I remember a cricket version – all the excitement of a small plastic ball with no weight being rolled down the tiny slope of the bowler’s arm and gently nudged by pressing the batter’s head to make his bat swing. ‘Waft’ might be a more accurate description than anything as suggestive of force and heft as ‘swing’.

    • Wembley was great. It was amazing how often Barnsley won the cup though!

      When I got into Subbuteo, when I was about 8 or 9, I used to devize leagues and write out a full set of fixtures, before playing the games myself. Today it’s all done by computer, but I often considered, as a 10 year old, putting myself forward for drawing up the league fixtures!

      I mentioned before, in another thread, that I still pine for my Subbuteo set, as I left it at my girlfriend’s parents house in Liverpool when we moved down to Brighton. The reason it was there was she had a younger brother so I took it over there to play it with him. It was around the time of the 1990 World Cup and I bought loads of teams from the World Cup and we played our own tournament. I must have had 20-30 teams in the end, along with loads of other accesories. When I split up with my girlfriend I never saw them again, along with other games I’d taken round there like Escape From Colditz, Poleconomy and Totopoly. I was far, far more upset at losing them than I was at losing a girlfriend of 6 years!

      I bought another football game when. Was younger too. It was a simple game played with little plastic players and a tiddlywink. It was a much easier game to play myself, as you weren’t trying to attack and defend at the same time like you had to with Subbuteo. Again, I devised league after league and played it for hours.

      • My Dad – who grew up in the 60s/70s- had both Subbuteo and Totopoly which he taught me to play in the late 80s/early 90s. I remember Totopoly would take ages – and there was a place near the end where you would fall if you werent in the inside lane.

        Subbeteo I just remember taking ages to pack away – but he and I used to play it all the time.

  39. We had very few boardgames at home when I was a kid, at least games that were complete. We had one pile of boards which had lost its pawns, and plenty of stray pawns which had lost their boards, along with twelve or so dominoes… We played cards a lot, and when we didn’t play cards we made our own board- or card games; own versions of Snakes and Ladders-type games, with cards to draw on certain squares with imaginative rewards or punishments written on them.
    And we’d make our own versions of Happy Families with funny drawings and short rhymes on each card. That was great, because we had a fun time creating the game for an hour or two, then more fun when playing it, and when we got tired of that game, we made another one.

    At playschool we had a Mikado obsession going…playing Ludo and Chinese Chequers less enthusiastically. But the only proper (and complete) game we got in the family in the 70s was Mastermind, which we all loved and never got tired of.

    I’ve played Monopoly once in my entire life…does anyone have time to play it more than once? 😉
    Extremely dull. But when Trivial Pursuit came along, I found my game! Me and my friends and my best friend’s family would play constantly, and I always won (they could never answer the brown questions, and I knew the answers to all of them, which they found terribly unfair!!!)

    I have a small collection of board games (mostly of the quiz variety) now that I never play, because I no longer have friends who enjoys playing them. For that same reason I’ve forgotten how to play almost all card games, once upon a time my favourite pastime.
    I still play patience IRL, but not as obsessively as I used to. The best game of my childhood was in fact a double patience (triple and quadruple worked too) that me and my childhood BF would play for hours on rainy or cold days on our holidays. I’ve never met anyone else who knew (or wanted to learn) how to play it, but I’ve never lost hope… Thinking back to her grandparents’ livingroom, snow or rain falling outside and us playing our cards and trying to keep track of the other person’s game at the same time, while listening to music, chatting and eating sweets, I still see them as magical moments of complete happiness.

    I’ve never been competitive in the sense of caring whether I win or lose, but I do enjoy winning against a bad loser…I’m afraid I’m one of those very annoying bad winners, who likes to rub it in and gloat triumphantly, while being completely indifferent to the reverse situation. Sorry! (not really…) 😀

    • 1. At last a mention for the daddy of board games, Snakes and Ladders. All those top hats and plastic wedges and bits of lead pipe in the billiard rum are so much fluff and dander when the real meat of board games is the outcome of the dice throw and the realisation that precisely that many squares away lies doom or reward. S&L is this high stakes tension uncut and mainlined and, best of all, can be played and fully appreciated by very, very, young children just as well as their wheezing grandparents.
      2. Everything changing with the throw of a dice reminds me of the episode of the tv show Community called Remedial Chaos Theory where six different timelines are created by a dice throw to decide who should collect a pizza. Board game hijinks are ideal sitcom fuel; another that springs to mind is a chess game in the tv show Bottom which – guess – descends quickly into violence.
      3. The bizarre fascination folk have with casinos (presumably because of Bond movies) meant there were a lot of roulette wheels knocking around when we were kids. You could stack your plastic chips on “black 45” and, sucking on your candy cigarette, imagine yourself in Monte Carlo, for tax purposes, because that’s what 8 year olds fantasise about.

  40. A few more….The Battle Of The Little Big Horn is a tremendous game for two, but I am convinced I am the only person who owns it. I used to enjoy Campaign too, but haven’t played for years. I inherited Kingmaker from my Dad, but can’t remember playing it.

    Careers anybody..? As I remember, you travel around collecting fame and happiness points (and money maybe?) by doing different jobs….seemed fun until you had to do for real.

  41. We used to have Frustration at home, which was basically Ludo, but the dice were contained within a plastic dome in the middle of the board and when it was your turn you used to push on the dome and it would shake the dice. It added a bit of drama to a game that was basically skill-free. Your pieces went round a plastic board in little slots, and if they landed on one that was already occupied by another player’s piece then said player’s piece went back to the start. Basically, the game was designed by Bell laboratories in the 50s as a psychological experiment to test the strength of American family ties.

    POP-AH!
    “1-2-3-4-5! Ha ha! Home you go!”
    “What? You @#&%!”
    POP-AH!
    “I’m going to get you, you %&@$!!”
    POP-AH!
    “Ha ha ha ha!”

  42. I loved Chess and Risk – used to have a New Year’s Eve tradition of playing this from just after midnight until I conquered the world about 8 hours later. Alcohol seemed to have zero effect on my inherent megalomania.

    As a child, I had an Alan Ball endorsed game called Soccerama. It was okay but you could make yourself virtually unbeatable through the accumulation of star players – a bit like La Liga nowadays.

    My friends had the Bobby Charlton-endorsed Casdon soccer which wasn’t strictly speaking a board game. It was played on an uneven surface with levers to work the players. I always aspired to this but never got it. It seemed to disappear quite quickly unlike the more enduring but fundamentally frustrating Subbuteo.

    When my daughter was young, we used to play Frustration, Mastermind, Boggle and a series of ridiculous board games based on Disney films – I remember the Hunchback of Notre Dame being a particular pain for a number of reasons.

    My grandkids chiefly play console games, especially Minecraft, but we did pick up Taxi in a charity shop and they like that, albeit with their own rules that in my view are tantamount to cheating – I’ve never won yet. I’m hoping to get them on scrabble before their vocabularies have expanded too much just so I can enjoy a few victories.

  43. We used to play family games a fair bit when I was a kid, until the Great Pictionary Argument, the echoes of which can still be heard reverberating around a holiday apartment on the Isle Of Wight. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT’S A HORSE? IT DOESN’T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE A ******ING HORSE! ARE YOU LOSING ON PURPOSE? IT’S NOT MY FAULT IF I CAN’T DRAW, WHY DON’T YOU HAVE A GO? WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO BE? RIGHT, I’M GOING OUT!

    There were two games I used to enjoy with my friends when I was ten or so. Talisman was a fantasy board game that was mentioned upthread, and one we played all the time. There’s been a reissued version in recent years which my brother bought. It’s still fun. The other one that used to get loads of play was a Judge Dredd boardgame (exhaustive review here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/806292/mistergs-review-judge-dredd). I was a 2000AD nut at the time, and I absolutely loved this. It captured the lunacy of early 80s Dredd perfectly, and had appearances from our your favourites – the Dark Judges, the League of Fatties, the Kleggs, the Angel gang….happy days.

    There’s a few games we currently play as a family. King Of Tokyo is really good. Admittedly a game themed around giant monsters punching each other in an East Asian megalopolis was always going to score highly with me, but even so it’s really well done. We also like Exploding Kittens, which is a card game version of Russian Roulette, only with cats that go bang instead of bullets. Offers huge opportunities for stitching up opposing players and has in no way caused any family arguments.

  44. Was this a board game..? Soccerette, where you moved players from underneath a raised ‘pitch’ with 2 sticks per person with magnets on the end. My version was (er….actually still is!) 5 a side.

    It was a bit of a waste of time really because the ball would just fly from end to end, passing was impossible, tackling was so fierce it broke the players, and you soon learnt that you could move the opposing players by turning your stick the other way up. It was actually better when the ball broke in half and you could have a slower game.

  45. As youngsters during school holidays we had a choice of Monopoly or Squatter, an antipodean variant. You own a sheep station of five paddocks with 3000 head of sheep (represented by 15 tiny plastic sheep heads). By astute sale and purchase of sheep and buying “improved” paddocks, you are the winner when you own five “irrigated” paddocks and 6000 head. When passing “Go” you receive a wool cheque, the amount of which depends on the number of sheep and stud rams (railway station equivalent) that you own. Of course you could be subject to drought, fire, sheep parasite infestations as well as the occasional windfall.

    Unlike Monopoly, a single game of which could stretch out for days, Squatter took only a few hours to play (and the Monopoly set was owned by my big brother, who wanted to charge us for using it).

    One board game I can’t get anyone interested I bought at a fete – “Bible Marathon” – but it’s probably a good thing as my ability to recall and quote scripture is a bit wonky these days.

  46. Anyone tried Cards Against Humanity? It surfaced here at Xmas 2 years back. I heard the GLW and the kids say things I never thought I’d hear uttered in our house. The first time we played I laughed so hard I feared for my trousers. It has rapidly diminishing returns, and if I’m honest, requires a pretty juvenile sense of humour.

      • I bought Exploding Cats last year for the step child that introduced us to CAH. Not heard Cats mentioned since – but there again they like to play a game called Bullshit and something where they stick spoons on their noses

  48. A couple of people have noted how often their preferred team won games of chance.

    I certainly witnessed this phenomenon when the red marbles represented GB in my own, personal childhood version of Jeux Sans Frontiers. All the European countries were lined up with two marbles each and took their turn to go as close as possible to a distant point at the other end of the room.

    I made a point of trying my best every time – even if I was “being” Luxembourg. It didn’t always happen…but more often than not the British marbles won. Why? Because I *wanted* them to win.

  49. Mastermind reminded me of another one called Masterpiece, involving purchasing works of art, with the risk that you might be buying a worthless forgery.

    Box artwork in that 70s old-money painterly illustrated style showing the glossy world of high living.

  50. We had a board games cafe in our village some months back and played “Survive – Escape from Atlantis”. It was fun so we ended up buying it with some expansion packs, but we’ve found that they over-complicate it and the game works best in its original form. A big plus is that it can’t go on forever like Monopoly and Cluedo, but is usually done in 45mins or so. The downside is that it’s extremely cut-throat; our friend who ran the cafe recommended Pandemic as a game that needs co-operation between players.

  51. I’m now listening to Radcliffe and Maconie doing this whole thread with their listeners. I should have a bingo sheet to tick off the games as they are mentioned.

  52. I’d endorse what others have said about Pandemic – terrific fun & a pleasing co-operative dynamic, which makes for a less snarky atmosphere than some games create.
    Most recent game I’ve tried is a dice based Walking Dead one – not a hit initially, seemingly too many nit picky aspects – but will give it another go as it may just be early go creakiness.
    2 games I’m considering for the Winterval are ‘ Terraforming Mars’ which has great reviews & a run time of about 2 hrs & ‘Andrenaline’, a super short 45 mins max job where you are a mega violent fighting bot with a ridiculous arsenal. Yet to decide , so any thoughts from the Massive very welcome.
    Am I alone in remembering ‘Kensington’, a kind of hexagon shaped checkers territory occupying type thing? Actually a very smart game – still have a set somewhere – the marketing gimic was that it was exactly the same size & shape as an LP, which wouldn’t appeal much to anyone these days, I guess.
    Always hated Monopoly ( just for the record).

  53. Totally agree with Podicle above. It’s a golden age for boardgames. “Classic” games like monopoly are rubbish in comparison. IMO games should be easy to learn (so my 7 year old can join in) and quick to play (less than an hour, 30 mins is better).

    Ticket to Ride, Carcassone and Settlers of Catan are new “classics” and all great
    Forbidden Island is great for families because its a co-operative game. ie the players work together to beat the game.
    Machi Koro is a newish Japanese one which is really fun.

  54. We spent a happy hour in Fanboy 3 yesterday. A new-ish game shop in Manchester – lots of Heroclix, Warhammer etc etc, but lots of the less well known (to me) board games and card games. The 8 year old got schooled in a game called Greedy Greedy Goblins by a girl and her dad who were just hanging out and playing. Pretty simple premise but good fun. We didn’t buy it – I kind of wish we did, but left with a Fluxx deck for his stocking.

    I’ve always liked games – as a kid I was always sucked in by the elaborately designed ones that inevitably turned out to be lacking in the gameplay factor (anyone remember Haunted House?). Though not a board game, the one me and our kid remember most fondly was Battling Tops (slogan: ‘It’s in the wrist action”) – essentially a gladiatorial arena for spinning tops.

    Me and the lad like any sort of Guess Who game and have played Scooby Snacks over and over – it’s essentially a themed Ugo deck – best £2 I ever spent. Still playing regularly 3 years later.

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