Operation: the drama and tension as you tried to remove a wishbone. My mom never got this game for me, so when I played it at friends houses it was even more coveted.
Perfection same reasoning as Operation.
**Score Four was always a popular game with us kids and is readily available on Ebay. Great Strategy game.
Monopoly who doesn’t love trying to bankrupt your playmates by charging them outrageous rents on the shitty purple properties?
Scrabble One of the best games ever. EVAH!!!111!!!
My grandparents lived in the Yakima Valley, where the game was created, and sent me one of the first editions to come out. I absolutely loved it.
I recently ordered a new version and introduced it to my family here in Japan. The reactions were all the same: skeptical at first, but then completely addicted by the second or third turn around the board.
I don’t think it came along until my teens, but Scattergories has always been one of my favorites. As a child I liked playing a game my grandpa had called Qubic, which was like a 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe. Connect Four and Uno were also fun favorites. I wish I had discovered Scrabble sooner, as I probably would have kicked ass at this game as a child.
When my daughter was little she always wanted me to play Life with her. Oh, how I hated that game! Insurance, the mortgage, the doctor bills! I was up to my ears in that in the game of IRL !!
My parents had an old copy of Careers that I loved to play. I don’t know if that game exists any more, or if it was even produced during my childhood (I’m 37 now)…
I bought it for my girls a few years back and we had a family game night. It was then that I discovered that the geniuses at Milton Bradley have changed the game. Now more gifts when you have babies. You can switch careers in the middle of the game…
I LOVED games that had bells and whistles and gadgets (Oh my!), like the aforementioned Operation and Life. Beyond that, there was…
Mousetrap
-and-
Which Witch was Which (that I tracked down on eBay, a pathetically trashed cheap version too, that ended up not nearly being as fun as I remembered :()
-and-
Simon (I’d go to sleep at night hearing those sounds and imagining patterns)
I’m with you there, I was the Life champ in my house. I still have my 1979 edition, although the spinner is missing the peg between 6 & 7. I recently bought the Simpsons Edition - which uses the new rules of course - and found that the spinner can be used in the older game.
Mine were Monopoly, and Scrabble. Words and spelling have always been my gig, and I used to love to play Scrabble with my mom. I couldn’t play it with anyone my own age, though, due to their vocabulary and spelling issues.
I still play it with my wife. A couple of weeks ago, she beat me.
Well, as a small child I loved Candyland, and my brother and I loooooved Hungry Hungry Hippos, too – Mom hated that one, though, because of all the noise the marbles & hippos made.
Sorry was a popular one in our household, as were Boggle and Booby Trap.
And Mousetrap! Ooh, that one was lots of fun!
One year on vacation, we had a game of Uno that went on for 4 hours. I kid you not. We kind of lost interest in it after that…
Risk was my number one game. My friends and I played it almost every day after school. I like the concept of MouseTrap, but not to play it all that often.
As for stupidfied games, Life has been, but so has Careers. My wife used to do toy reviewing, so she got all the new editions, and that has been PCed, so no more hearts in Pago Pago. But the number one stupidfied game is Uncle Wiggly. The old version had cards with negative numbers, when the Uncle had to go backwards. This is now considered way too hard a concept for kids to understand, and the negative numbers have vanished.
We do a Games Night for the Gifted kids in our school district, and they love a newer mechanical game called Loopin Louie, which has something to do with an airplane swinging around and knocking off chickens.
Risk and Monopoly. On both games I could be defeated, but I never gave up and conceded a game. If I was losing I would back down on my last country, or mortgage my last property, to make the winner take extra time to win. I was stubborn.
