Games We Grew Up With
by Tyler Woods on Oct. 21, 2009, under Life
I was talking to a friend this morning and somehow we got on the subject of playing board games. The conversation went something like, no matter where were are in time, the one thing that seems to stick around is board games and this got me thinking…
As a kid, I used to play lots of board games. I had several favorite board games. As a very young child I loved ladders and Chutes. As I got older, Clue and Life were my favorites. Ahhh but Monopoly was fun as well. Though with Monopoly, it could go on for days and my sister and I would always put the board under the bed with the pieces still in tact so we could play the next day.
Hands Down was another game my sister and I played. It was sort of a card game and you slapped these hands down, thus the name, “Hands Down” I remembered we slapped it so hard that the game broke pretty quickly. The same thing happened with the game Mousetrap. Some of these games were made of cheap plastic and fell apart, still they were the games us kids felt we could not live without.
My sister wanted the Mystery Date game and received that one year for Christmas. Even as a young child, I laughed at the door on the board game and watched my sister and her friends play it. I thought it was the dumbest game of all, but I remember my sister thought it was all that and more.
For me as a kid I would always ask for several board games each year for Christmas and birthdays and I recall some of the silliest games such as a game called Swack which was a huge mouse trap and you had to take little plastic chunks of cheese before you hand got SWACKED! Cootie was a must have game even if you didn’t like, you had to own it if you wanted to be considered a real “gamer” .
I was a young hippie and a rock and roller so of course for me,what would be a game if we did not have a game with the Beatles? I had The Beatles Flip Your Wig which sold in 1964 for about 3 bucks and now goes for almost 1,000. Sure wished I held onto mine.
Battleship, Scrabble, Operation, Checkers, Password, Parcheesi, Yahtzee, Twister, Concentration, were all games that lined our closets as kids. I sadly did not hang on to any of those games. I will say that even today, when going to friend’s homes, there is nothing like playing a good old fashioned game and spending the evening laughing and giggling . Does this mean I am old, or just like having fun?
What was your favorite games growing up?
