Board games pt 2

Tweet

Yesterday I started my board game post. Ironically, my husband went to Goodwill and a retro store after I had posted, and I saw a couple of the games I had mentioned, and I also found some I didn't mention. I picked up a few games from Goodwill yesterday, but I won't be mentioning them in this post. Today I'll mention a couple of classics and maybe a couple of more unheard-of ones. I couldn't talk about board games and not mention one of the OG board games that people think of when they think of board games. Candyland came out in 1949, so the vast majority of people alive today have played it, whether it was as a child or when they had a child. It was a really simple game that I loved as a child, but as an adult, I have to say I didn't enjoy it as much when I played with my son. The story behind Candyland is actually very sweet. The woman who invented it, Eleanor Abbott, who was a school teacher, created it while she was recovering from polio, and she invented it for children who were in the hospital ward recovering from Polio. The game is very simple the goal is just to be the first to get to King Kandy's castle by following the colorful path along the board. There are sometimes obstacles in the way, and you draw a card on your turn to see where you go. My version as a kid had little cardboard gingerbread men, or what I think were supposed to be gingerbread men, but my son's version had plastic pieces that held up much better. I think now they might have people instead of gingerbread men. Next up is my family's favorite BOGGLE. BOGGLE is a word game with a bunch of dice-like pieces with letters on them that you shake up, and you have to create words out of connecting letters. Every so many letters in the word adds a point as long as no one else has the word. The goal is to find words that no one else has. In my family, you started playing BOGGLE as soon as you learned to read. I was seven or eight, playing with adults, and of course I never won because my reading was limited in comparison to theirs. We took the game very seriously. We brought out the dictionary to prove whether or not it was a word. There were heated exchanges over whether it was a word or not, but nothing felt more victorious than proving your word was, in fact, a word. Everyone would grumble upon seeing that it was in the dictionary and move on. If you wanted to win, you had to prove every word you used was a word and prove you spelled it correctly. Now I'm going to mention a game most people may not have heard of because it wasn't a major game. Back in the 80s and early 90s, Cabbage Patch Kids were the doll to have, so it's no surprise they created some board games for the brand too. As a kid, I got The Cabbage Patch Kids Bicycle Race Game for Christmas. It was a simple game, but I seemed to love it. The goal was to be the first player to race your Cabbage Patch Kid bicycle pawn across the countryside to the finish line to win. I can't remember all of the details of this game because I was really young when I had it. It came out in 1990, and I'm not sure how old I was when I got it, but in 1990 I was only 3. I remember playing it off and on up until I was a little older, but I probably stopped playing it by the time I was 8 or 9. When I was a kid, my parents hit up a lot of garage sales, which is where a lot of my clothes came from, but we also got some pretty cool toys and games from them. One of those games was Go to the Head of the Class. I loved this game. It was a trivia game with things you might have learned in school. Anyone who knows me knows I love trivia games. The goal of the game was to be the first to go from kindergarten to 8th grade by answering trivia questions. You could choose the difficulty of the question when it was your turn, depending on the subject. If it was a subject you were good at, you could choose a harder one; if it was one you were bad at, you could choose an easier question. You had to pass a final exam at the end of each grade to move on to the next grade. I had the older version of this as a kid, but years later I bought a newer version of it. Back in 2007, Jeff Foxworthy hosted a game show called Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader, where adults had the chance to earn money by testing their elementary school knowledge to see if they were smarter than a 5th grader. If they got stumped, they could ask one of the children to help them. I remember thinking when the kids got it wrong that they were still smarter than that particular 5th grader. There was one kid on there who rarely got a single question wrong; I think his name was Nathan. I also will never forget when Kelly Pickler was on there as a contestant because they sometimes had celebrities come on. To this day, I am pretty positive she was the dumbest contestant on there; I've always hoped it was an act. Anyway, they ended up making a board game, which I own. It's similar to the game show, but obviously works a bit differently since you don't have a panel of children to help you. Anyone who knows me knows I love movies, and a game dedicated to movies AND trivia? Yes please. Scene It? was a game I remember playing a lot over the years. I own both the movie and TV Scene It games. This was the one game where my family would fight to have me on their team. It was a pretty simple game where you answered movie or TV trivia, depending on which version you were playing, to be the first to the end. You usually play with teams, but I think you can play with two players; I haven't played in a long time. The last game I'll mention is another trivia classic, Trivial Pursuit. I have several versions of this game. We bought one with more family-oriented trivia when my son was little. The goal is to fill your little pie with the different category colors and make it to the finish. Sports was always the worst category for me and would be the main reason I'd lose if I lost. That's the last of the games I'll mention today, but I'll come up with another list later. It's amazing how many board games have been made, from the classics to the more obscure games no one has ever heard of.