What was your favorite childhood game?
My little brother and cousins and I used to play Hungry Hungry Hippos for HOURS until my mother finally snapped and demanded we take the noisy plastic/marbles game outside or it was going in the trash compactor.
A.
When I was a LITTLE little kid, I had a toy gas station and some little cars that went with it, and I would play with that thing for hours. When it came to board games, initially I liked the Rube Goldberg-ish ones like “Mouse Trap” and one other whose name I can’t recall that was vaguely jungle-related and had steel marbles. From about 9 on, though, it was Monopoly; my cousin and a friend and I got written up in the Hartford paper in ’75 for an ill-fated attempt to break the world record for playing Monopoly in a tree house.
Now? Uno. The kids and my sibs and their kids and I can play that for hours. And my late father-in-law, after getting hit with the dreaded “Draw 4” card, always responded the same way: “What a revoltin’ development THIS is.”
Looking back, I’ve got to give my parents credit — in addition to tons of books, we had board games (Masterpiece, Life, Battleship, Dogfight, Monopoly, Risk, and more), decks of cards, chess/checker sets, science kits (grow your own crystals), Hot Wheels cars, Erector Sets, a ping pong table…hours of boredom relief.
And that doesn’t even include stuff like the two-on-two baseball games (or variants) we used to play with the neighbors in the vacant lot.
Hard to say what my favorite was…guess it depended on the time of year.
I was big on Battleship as a wee laddie then graduated to Risk. Guess I should be a world conqueror by now…
“Lie Detector: The Game of Deductive Reasoning”!
Oh, and Matchbox cars.
We played lots of board games … “Sorry” and “Othello,” and yes we were the kind of family that played chess, too. Nerd alert!
But one of my fondest memories is when my cousin from California came out to visit us on the east coast for a summer. It was the summer that Simon & Garfunkel’s The Graduate album came out. And we played that record and hands of gin rummy over and over and over all summer long.
Anyone remember playing “Life”? You had a little car, pink or blue depending on your gender. And you got little sticks people to put in it? That was a hoot.
Tree top tag, outdoors. There were three enormous deciduous trees that formed a triangle and their branches interlaced just enough for a bunch of scrawny kids to spend hours up there chasing round and round and up and down. No particular favorites indoors. I mostly read and sketched animals.
all games just pale to sheepshead. gramdpa got us young. i liked mousetrap too.
Monopoly. We could stretch a game out for days. Players could borrow from the bank or from each other, so no one ever went bankrupt.
Hot Wheels was a fav, the ‘rents found bags of track and connectors at garage sales to add to the collection. I’d make long roads that started at the top of my bunk bed, went down the hall over the top of chairs, through the kitchen, and down into the basement.
That morphed into the Aurora HO road race set I inherited from some much older cousins which evolved into a huge layout with added track and cars. Still have all that in a box in the basement.
Tonka Toys. Had a Jeep and Log Truck that I played with so much that my mother hid them. I didn’t know where they had disappeared to till in my Teens I happened to come on their hiding place by accident.
(My parents were scared of the world. In the late 60s got me a chemistry set but quickly took it up as they were worried about my using it – despite that I had done absolutely nothing to give them any worry about it. Looking back, several times I can think of times of giving something too much attention only for it to disappear).
I’ve seen similar on the market still.
Had an electronics kit. It was a bunch of cubes with the electrical symbol on the top. And magnets on the bottom so you could put the cubes together according to the plans in the book and they would stay in place (plus, Looking back, could be used as a common ground as needed).
On the 4 sides of the cubes were the contacts. The book provided all sorts of plans of how you could arrange the cubes to build electric circuits. But assembly and disassembly was a simple as placing a (? 1/2 inch?) cube on the board.