It's just a complicated game

Before I get into the main content of this post, I feel I should mention that I received some Oz buttons from shadarko, and they look cool. Now I just have to figure out something I can do with all these buttons I keep getting. If I were still in school, I could attach them to my backpack.

So, as I indicated in my last post, this one is about board and card games I played as a kid. I did play a lot of the more common ones (Monopoly, Life, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, etc.), but I decided to focus here on ones that aren't quite as famous. I played most of these with my dad and brother; my mom never particularly liked games, nor do I know anyone now who cares for them. Around when we first started dating, I made bethje try a few of these, but I haven't tried that in more recent years.

Uncle Wiggily - Based on a series of books I never read, this was one of the first games I can remember playing. The winner was the first to reach the end of the track (at Dr. Possum's), and movement was based on cards with rhymes on them.

Garfield - There have probably been a lot of games based around the most heavily merchandised feline in history, but this particular one essentially made Garfield the bad guy, telling the players what to do (in the form of cards that were drawn whenever someone landed on a "Garfield Changes His Mind" space).

Mille Bornes - This French card game is apparently not THAT obscure, but I haven't seen that many other people talk about it. You have to play enough mileage cards to reach your goal, and you can use bad cards (flat tires, accidents, etc.) to hinder the other players. I played this one a lot growing up.

Dungeon! - My mom bought this one for me at a yard sale on the day I finished one of the later elementary school grades. It's made by TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, and is sort of a much simpler, board-based version of D&D. The object is to kill monsters (which is accomplished by rolling the dice) and obtain treasures. There are four character classes (elf, hero, superhero, and wizard), but we usually just played with everyone as a superhero to make things simpler. My dad was never really into complicated games. I remember one year he and I both got Avalon Hill games for Christmas, and he refused to even try them upon looking at the rules. Anyway, Dungeon! was pretty fun, although I don't recall being all that good at it. I think Beth beat me at it the one time I forced her to play it with me, and that was with no prior experience on her part.

Bonkers - Not associated with the Disney Afternoon show about the cartoon cat who became a police officer (which I'll somewhat ashamedly admit to having watched back when it was on), the gimmick to this game was that the players essentially created the game anew every time.

Dragonmaster - A Hearts-style card game, where there's a penalty for taking certain cards (which ones varied from one hand to another. One distinguishing feature of the rules (reproduced here in text format without word wrap, which makes them difficult to read) is that they included a big, long back story that had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual gameplay.

So, has anyone else played any of these? And what games did you like to play? Or are you one of those all-too-common game-haters? And why am I asking these questions, when the posts where I practically beg for comments tend to be the ones that don't get any?

If you pass Go, collect $200

One game that I meant to mention in my last post but forgot during the actual writing was Advance to Boardwalk, a Monopoly derivative where you built hotels on the Boardwalk. I remember that one of the tokens was a baby buggy, but not all that much else about it. Honestly, we never played it that much. Thinking about it did, however, make me recall some other games inspired by the classic Monopoly. There was something called Free Parking, which I seem to recall trying to play in school, or at least watching other people play. I remember trying to play the original Monopoly in school, and arguing with other kids about the rules. Some of them said that you weren't allowed to buy property until you'd been all the way around the board once, which I'd never heard of. On the other hand, I always played so you'd get money on Free Parking, which isn't in the official rules, but I believe it's pretty common.

The young daughter of one of the women my dad dated had Monopoly Junior, in which the rules were a lot simpler, and you bought amusement park rides instead of streets. Wikipedia also mentions a die-rolling game called Don't Go to Jail, which I hadn't heard of before. The interesting thing is that I think all of these games were products of the eighties or early nineties, even though Monopoly itself had been around for decades before that. The trend of Monopoly knock-offs based on other towns, movies, TV shows, popular characters, breeds of animal, etc. also seems to be relatively new, although I'm sure people were coming up with unlicensed versions of these things long before they came to be sold in stores. I remember coming up with the list of properties for a Monopoly game based on my own hometown, although I never got as far as actually making a board or anything. I remember finding a Monopoly-type game about racism at my grandmother's house; I think she'd taken it from a magazine.