Games people play(ed)
I learned as a child (and confirmed in the ensuing years),
that there are two kinds of people in this world:
Those who are “Game Players”…and those who are not.
I am very happy and quite proud, to declare that my family and I were…
“Game Players”…BIG TIME!!
I played games all the time, everywhere.
I played games with my sister Ellen, with my friends, with my younger cousins,
(didn’t like when my Mom told me I had to let them win).
But what I liked best…
was sitting around the living room table on Sunday afternoons
and playing games with Ellen, my Mom and my Dad.
Which game we played was secondary to this special time shared,
watching my hard-working parents playing silly “kid games” with us.
We played games in restaurants (with other patrons staring at us),
during road trips in the car, in doctor’s waiting rooms …everywhere!
We played board games, sports games, card games, educational games,
silly games, skill games, word games, brain games, made-up games.
And know what?
As The Forever Kid…
I’m still playing games all the time, with friends, my kids and now my grandkids.
And I must say, I have also become rather adept at creating new games.
But now, let me take you back to the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and the games that we played back then.
I suspect many of you, may have played them too!
So get your spinners, dice, cards and…
Let’s Play!
We begin with our classic “first games”:
CandyLand – As its name implies, this was a totally “sweet” experience…
traveling around a dreamland of cakes and candies and confections.
(This was before the “sugar police” and advent of “healthy snacks”).
And…you didn’t even have to be able to read!! Picture cards told you where to move.
Innocence personified!
Chutes & Ladders – Not quite as sweet. This game gave us our first taste of “success and failure”
…climbing the ladders to victory, only to slide down the “chutes” of disappointment.
( I remember some tears and tantrums sliding down the giant chute, just steps away from winning).
Little Noddy’s Taxi Game – Not exactly a “classic”, but one of my early faves.
It came with 4 molded taxi cabs and 4 different colored “Noddy” characters,
(looking somewhat like a Smurf).
The 4 “Noddys” would race through the towns and countryside to see who would complete their trips first.
(And not an Uber in sight!)
Two of my other kiddie games were based on media properties…
Peter Pan’s Adventure…An obvious choice for a future Forever Kid, and…
(I SWEAR this was the name)…
Pinky Lee and the Runaway Frankfurters…This featured kid TV personality, Pinky Lee,
(a precursor to Pee Wee Herman),
loading up a cart of tiny plastic hot dog buns and making stops to insert the weenies.
Rather trippy, huh?.
As a kindergartener, I moved onto games requiring more dexterity and skill….
Cootie…Ah, the disgusting, somewhat terrifying game of removing and assembling a giant bug’s wings and legs.
What dark, sadistic fun!
Tiddley Winks…Deftly flicking tiny plastic discs into tiny cups.
Spent mindless hours at this.
Pick Up Stix – Requiring mucho skill and a steady hand.
NOTE: I remember my dad’s floor covering store selling a linoleum with a “Pick-Up Stix” pattern…
and it came with the game! Strewing the skinny plastic “stix” on top of this vinyl pattern,
made it nearly impossible to succeed!
Mouse Trap – Perhaps not the best game theme for a kid living in the Bronx!
Basically, kids had to build a mousetrap piece-by-piece,
leading to trapping the mouse as it goes for the prized cheese.
More vermin fun!
Mr & Mrs Potato Head …
NOTE: “Mrs” was added as an early “statement” for “equal opportunity”.
Before “plastic potatoes” were included,
we used actual spuds (or other veggies) to insert eyes, nose, mouth, ears and hats.
Making for some rather grotesque creatures.
Etch-A-Sketch – Somehow I never quite mastered the “dual knob” technique.
Over the years, I have seen some incredible artwork “etched”.
Then, I somehow had three games that were slight variations on the same thing:
Parcheesi, Sorry, Trouble…
They all required moving around a board as fast as possible without being sent back.
Parcheesi used dice.
Sorry used cards (and induced the whiny tease “Sahr-ree”)
Trouble gave us the most incredibly annoying “Pop-O-Matic”!!
Other early favorites were…
Guess Who?...A great game that I still play with my kids and grandkids…
(AND I later helped to create commercials for).
Basically, by viewing pix of 25 various goofy characters, players try to “Guess Who”
by process of elimination, through asking questions about physical features
NOTE: When I now play with my adult “kids”, we play “Subjective Guess Who”, asking questions about
what the characters’ appearances may indicate about their “emotional and psychological profiles”.
Lie Detector…A more intriguing version of “Guess Who?” ,
that involved solving crimes. 24 suspects, interrogations, “secret information clues” and…
the cool “Lie Detector Machine”.
Each player questions a suspect by inserting a suspect card into the Lie Detector.
To determine the truth of the testimony, a needle on the machine points to “True” or “False”.
By process of elimination, the suspects are narrowed down, until a player makes an arrest.
Dum, de dum dum!!
As I progressed through my early education endeavors,
(with the urging of my parents),
I moved on to more “educational” games…
Go to the Head of the Class....This was the most blatant attempt at improving my scholastic standing.
Rather than moving around a board, one would move up “grade after grade”
by being able to correctly answer questions in various subjects.
While I did fairly well with these random facts, my actual grades showed little improvement.
Game of the States …The “board” was made up of a colorful, illustrated map of the 50 (48?) states.
Each state had images of their products, industries, resources…along with their capital city and other facts.
The idea of the game was to drive your truck coast to coast, buy products from one state and sell in another.
Very educational…especially if you wanted to grow up to be a truck driver.
Marlin Perkins Zoo Parade – Based on a TV show, the goal of the Zoo Parade game
was to capture wild animals from across the continents and bring them to the zoo as the “Zoo Director”.
The intent was to teach us kids about animals and habitats.
What I remember most about the game was that it was the one game
kept in the upstairs “office space” of my parents’ floor covering store.
My sister and I played it almost every day.
To stimulate our youthful minds, there was also…
Yahtzee (which I still play) and MasterMind , requiring some analytical skills and patience….
(Not my strong suit)
And then there was the little-known Astron.
Sometimes I think I dreamt this game…but it really existed.
The premise was to fly your airplane around the world, stopping at various airports …
while avoiding storms, turbulence, delays.
Great for a kid’s anxiety!
The super-cool feature of the game was that it had a screen that “scrolled” by turning a knob,
thus navigating your plane to airport destinations or through unexpected hazards!
It was about as “techy” as pre-video games provided.
While these games taught us math, geography, history, science, zoology, aviation…
as we were soon to learn in the real world, there was much more to be learned…
The Game of Life...This was a biggie! And pricey, with its three-dimensional board and spinner.
Rather weirdly, pre-teen kids were asked to make major “life decisions” by taking various paths…
getting married, having kids (one or two or three) or going to college or getting a job,
plus buying insurance, planning for retirement.
Pretty heavy for a 10 year-old! (and all this with no “therapist” path!!)
What made it even more traumatic was, depending on your choices, you would wind up in…
“Millionaire Acres” or the “Poor Farm”!?!
Enough to make any kid not want to grow up!
Careers…Forget about marriage, kids, insurance…this game was all about “making it” through career choices.
What was interesting (and rather telling) was at the beginning of the game,
each player would come up with their own “formula for success”,
designating percentages of how their goals were divided by “fortune”, “fame”, and “happiness”.
Then, by choosing various paths in moving around the board…
they would be “fast-tracked” or take their time (with college) to achieve their goals.
Banking? Industry? Hollywood? Academics? Construction? Real Estate? Philanthropy?
All a bit much for me,
who was interested in playing stickball and flirting with my 5th grade crushes!
My games “arsenal” (jammed into my “games closet”)
also included several games based on TV shows…
Concentration (the rebus game); Treasure Hunt; Jeopardy; $10,000 Pyramid; Password; You Don’t Say.
(Many of these games had question cards that we took to play at dinner!)
And there was Name that Tune, that came with a vinyl record of tunes to identify,
along with a “gong” that was to be rung after running across the room!
Of course, being so sports-crazy,
I had baseball, football, basketball, hockey games that ate up hours of my young life.
The LOUD and active Nok-Hockey, Bop Baseball, Bas-Ket.
The “primitive’, simplistic (but totally enjoyable) precursors to video games…
Electric Football and Baseball!! …
using “electric vibrations” to have players “move”!?!
(Unfortunately they usually uncontrollably ran around in circles).
Finally there were the “stat-based” sports games…
The esoteric Strat-O-Matic using stats, analytics, even stadium and weather conditions.
And then then, Ladies and Gentlemen……
my ALL TIME FAVORITE GAME!!!!!…
All-Star Baseball!!
My godsend of a game was basically a batting simulation of major league baseball players’ performance.
It was built around a spinner and player disks, divided into sections in such a way
that a hitter had the probability of reproducing his real-life statistics
in categories like home runs, triples, doubles, singles, walks, and strikeouts.
There were “all-stars” of the present and past.
I spent hours and hours creating and naming teams, setting up a “season schedule”
and keeping records and intricate stats in a leather-bound “ledger”.
I credit this game with teaching me my math skills!
(e.g. 30 hits in 80 at bats, means a .375 batting average. I can still figure out ANY average or E.R.A.!)
If I had to estimate…I’d say I spent at least 25 hours a week on “All-Star” ,
(My Mom would chastise me “ENOUGH WITH THOSE ‘WHEELS’!!”)
And no posting about games would be complete without paying homage to the universal “classics”…
Clue, Risk and the G.O.A.T.,,,MONOPOLY!
I think it’s fair to assume that just about every single person reading this, has played all of these games…
I’ll bet at some moment in your life you’ve said the words:
“I accuse Miss Scarlett, in the Conservatory, with the Candlestick!?”
I also had another Clue-like game called 221 B Baker Street,
based on the cases of Sherlock Holmes.
Not quite so “elementary”!
And didn’t we all take some rather malevolent, sadistic pleasure in…
dominating Risk with the annexation and take over of countries like
Yakutsk, Congo (and I’m ashamed to say) Ukraine?
Time to Pass GO!!
I must have easily played over 500 games of Monopoly…
(and “completed” maybe 5!!)
One epic Monopoly marathon I recall,
was a seemingly never-ending, 5-day game against my future brother-in-law, Hal.
At one point, Hal had pretty much defeated me. I was bankrupt.
However, to extend my torture even longer…
Hal offered to give me $500 if I would sell him…THE RULES!!?
It kept me “alive” for a while, but when we later argued about me being allowed to sell one of my properties…
Hal would not permit me to check…his rules!
In addition to board games,
my family and I played all sorts of card games…
Rummy, Casino, War, Spit, Group Solitaire, Po-Keno, Uno,
“Pisha-Pasha” (my grandma’s European game)…
And the cruelly, sadistic game of…KNUCKS!
(where the loser of each round would get smacked on the knuckles by the victor!)*
*NOTE: If blood was drawn…the “victim” would get to give “knucks” to the guilty party!!
And we played random games like…
Twister, Hangman, Charades, 20 Questions.
One year, for my sister Ellen’s birthday, I was obsessed with buying her…
A OUIJA BOARD !?!?!
I remember my father driving me all around The Bronx,
to find the rare toy store that would fulfill my mystical quest.
We finally found it.
Pretty much sucked!
As fate would have it, coming full circle, as an adult, when I worked as a creative in advertising,
one of my favorite accounts was…Hasbro!
I helped create commercials for many of the games I’ve mentioned,
plus a bunch of new ones…and, I don’t know…
but it seems like maybe today’s kids are even weirder than we were???
Today, The Forever Kid is still playing games with family and friends…
Plus at our group “game nights”, I have been charged with creating new games!
I’m please to say…that I’ve come up with some pretty good ones…
NOTE: I often share these custom-made games with my subscribers…come join us!
GAME ON!
Would love to hear about your game-playing memories.
