Back in the 60s, we had a board game called “Touring England” (well - actually Wales as well). Cards with city names were dealt to all players, and the object was to visit all your cities first with your little car following the dots on the board/map, following the rolls on the die/dice. (you could take shortcuts by ferry across bodies of water like the Severn, but you needed to roll a 6).
Without this game, I never would have known about places such as “Llandudno” and “Aberystwyth”.
I quite like an album called “Aberystwyth Marine” by µ-Ziq, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve unsuccessfully said “Alexa, play ‘Aberystwyth Marine’”, trying to get the device to recognize the pronunciation…the problem is, it’s occasionally successful, so I know it works. Anyway, that’s the only reason I know that name.
In Junior High, a group of us played Risk regularly. We eventually decided that the board was too restrictive, so we modified it to include Antarctica, and made up additional cards to support it. Antarctica could be attacked from Argentina, South Africa, and Eastern Australia. It was actually a pretty good hack…
We did almost nothing during the summer of '67 except play Risk. Day and night, five or six days a week.
ONE game of Risk…
We ended up making special “100 Armies” pieces, and would make ridiculously tall piles of those on critical countries. And all battles were fought “the real way”: one die at a time. So a battle could take until bedtime and restart before any of our parents were up.
But when a character in Stranger Things got kidnapped to Kamchatka, I felt so smart, and decided that those thousands of hours were worth it.
