Dude–did nobody play The Barbie Game?
It rocked. I loved Poindexter.
Also, who remembers Masterpiece?
I squealed when I read this. I LOVED this game as a kid.
I remember playing a game with my family called “Zilch”, I think. I don’t remember much beyond that, except that it had a red-themed board and dice. The main reason I remember the game is that I lost badly when I was five and started that hiccupy bawling…my mom said, “Ricky, stop crying! It’s just a game!” and I replied, “I…(hiccup, snuffle)…can’t (hiccup)…help it!” That’s become a catch-phrase in the family. Good times, good times.
Sublight… Careers!!! I loved this game. I think I liked it because each player had to set their own goals for Love, Fame, or Fortune points and then attempt to achieve them.
I remember being really paranoid about running out of scoresheets, so I made my parents contact the manufacturer and order a bunch of extra scoresheet pads. I still have a bunch of them in my basement.
Many of the board games mentioned are certainly not obscure, but certainly still nostalgic.
There was a great one with a large plastic shark with a hinged mouth that was filled with little plastic flotsam. You were supposed to hook out the junk from the shark’s mouth before it snapped shut. Can’t remember the name of the game at all though…
There was also a great game with castle bricks, and rubber-band powered catapults and crossbows, where you shot little plastic disks across the room and tried to knock flags off our opponent’s castle. It had an expansion set with a trojan horse where if you triple or quadruple wrapped the rubber bands, you could get such high tension that you could explode your opponent’s castle in one shot. I nailed my brother in the forehead once, he ran screaming away bleeding.
Speaking of Dark Tower, I’ve got a friend that just bought one off of eBay for about $120 in good condition (not great). It works and makes the little noises. There’s a website that tells all about it. and even has the sounds.
My parents had this guy called Figleaf. It was an, ahem, adult version of Pin the tail on the Donkey There were 5 foot tall naked pictures (with the privates covered with the shape of Figleaves that the participants would hold up and then others would take the sticky figleaf and…well…you get the idea. In retrospect, it’s a really creepy thing to think your parents played. Shudder.
There was another game from the late 70s/Early 80s called Survive!. You had people on a deteriorating island that had to be loaded onto ships and then moved to the safe islands while your competitors got to move whales and sharks and sea serpents to gobble up your people or sink their ships.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/ has a lot of good ol’ games listed…
Oops. Sublight, after re-reading your post I see that your memory is better than mine. The heart points were indeed Happiness points, not Love points.
PS - I always loaded up with Fame (stars) because I loved choosing an astronaut career.
That was Jaws based off of the movie if it’s the same one I’m thinking of…
Survive! kicked large amounts of ASS.
I got it as a holiday present when I was younger, and my parents almost immediately regretted it, as perhaps the third game we ever played (and possibly every game thereafter) quickly degenerated into a maelstrom of insults, betrayal, back-room dealings involving bribery/threats/offers of servitude, which proceedings as often as not further degenerated into fisticuffs. It was a sight to behold.
On a less obscure but nevertheless nostalgic note, my roommate and I bought a Monopoly board for kicks when we were unemployed and all our friends were still in school. The factions and allegiances that each game created and then destroyed would spill over into real life, which was dangerous for our group of seven friends that spent ALL our time together. I distinctly remember one time that I slept on the floor of the living room because my girlfriend did not want me in bed with her after I had traded Marvin Gardens (which she needed) to my roommate in a “bankruptcy settlement” which netted me a few turns worth of “rent amnesty,” plus a sixer of Heineken and twenty-five bucks off that month’s rent.
What can I say? He was pissed at my girlfriend for events from the last game, and it sounded like a pretty good deal at the time.
Cosmic Encounter. One of my teachers in junior high school had this game in her class. Since it was an enrichment class, we got to play CE fairly frequently.
Briefly, the game has some similarities to Risk, except that players competed over planets on a hexagonal board. Another distinguishing point is that each player took on the role of a different alien species. Each alien species had different advantages and disadvantages that would come into play during battles.
Unlike Risk, sometimes when you’d lose a battle and have your tokens swept from the board, you’d sometimes be able to return the “dead” tokens back to the game later on.
I’ve recently found that Cosmic Encounter is still around, and still has an underground following. There’s plenty of info to be found on Google.
When I was a young’un - in the late 70s - we used to play a game called Go to the Head of the Class.
It was a trivia game that sparked my undying love of trivia games.
I had that, and was happy to see they still make it.
Another one I just thought of, though I don’t remember the name: you had to make your way around a small board without getting captured by a vampire. If you did, the back part of the game was a stand-up cardboard vampire with working jaws that would bite you with little red felt-tip teeth. Maybe it was “I Vant To Bite Your Neck”?
If we’re talking board games, I’ll nominate The Awful Green Things From Outer Space. It was a lighthearted two-player science-fiction game where one player controlled the crew of a spaceship, and the second player controlled a swarm of Awful Green Things that had invaded. There were tokens that randomly determined at the start of the game what various items (fire extinguisher, spam, laser pistol, etc.) would do to the AGTs; the crew-player had to experiment with each against the horde, and hoped to find something effective in time. It was a bit lopsided in favor of the AGTs, but still fun.
If we’re not restricted to board games, then Flying Buffalo’s Nuclear War deserves to be in the pantheon of games. I first learned this game in college, and wasted many afternoons down at the student center, huddled around a table obliterating my peers. Most games tend to degenerate into a crescendo of mutual destruction, and the fun usually came from seeing (a) who was the last to go, and (b) whether or not he could go out in a spectacular fashion – such as using a 100-megaton warhead to accidentally start a chain reaction that destroyed the entire solar system. 
Man, could I go for a fresh can of Zgwortz!
(I still have this game sitting on my shelf; tons o’ fun, especially the random chit that causes your weapons to multiply the AGTs rather than destroy them. And the robot rocked).
Howzabout this one: I don’t remember the name, but it was a large glow-in-the-dark board, and you moved your men around the perimeter. Intermitently, there were holes in the board (which also looked like some painted spaces on the board, so you couldn’t really see 'em coming), and your man would fall through. In addition, there were three larger holes in the center of the board. Periodically, you would have to reach into one (to retrieve your man? As a punishment?) and touch “bat wings” (feathers), “snakes” (rubber bands), and “X” (x) (I don’t remember what was in the third one). The whole board was done up with a graveyard/Halloween motif. Sound familiar? Think circa '73.
Any way, as both a glow-in-the-dark AND a Halloween junkie, this one saw as much playtime as I could get with it (it was my older brother’s game, so I couldn’t play with it at will).
Settler of Catan, and sequel Seafarers of Catan. Set on a hexagonal grid where each hexagon produces a certain type of resource based on roles of two dice. You build settlements, roads, and cities along the edges of the hexagons, and then use the resources you pick up to build more. loads of fun.
Guillotine. Humorous card game from Wizard’s of the coast. Players are rival guillotine operators attempting to execute various French nobles during the revolution. Most points for those who get high-ranking characters such as Louis XVI.
Axis and Allies. Very complicated World War II game.
YES! I found it!!!
stpauler, thank you for posting that link to boardgamegeek. I decided to look at Hasbro.com from there and got referred to boardgames.com, where I not only found Careers, but another wonderful game from my ute:
The Farming Game. As a weekend farmer, you try to raise crops and take care of livestock until you make enough to quit your day job and farm full-time. My grandparents used to live in the Yakima Valley (where the designers live and where the game is set), and they sent me a copy back when it first came out.
I ordered those two, plus Settlers of Cataan and Mille Bournes. We’re a bit starved for board games (there’s nothing in Japan except for Monopoly and Life), and these are ones where langauge ability and cultural background don’t affect the game much.
My family was more into card games, so we had Touring (which was just Milles Bournes with different cards) and Pit!, in which each player had nine cards and attempted to obtain a full matching set of nine whatever (I think they were grains - flax, barley, wheat and so forth) by trading with other players. Much shouting was involved; you won by ringing the bell in the middle of the table, which could get violent if the person you’ve just traded with also completed a set at the same time as you.
My fiance and some of his friends still geek out on this one. They play every once in a while and it pretty much occupies a Sunday.
Hey, I remember both phouka’s Snit’s Revenge and rjung’s Awful Green Things fondly.
I was also a big fan of SPI wargames, especially the SF/Fantasy ones - Like Outreach, Freedom of the Galaxy, War of the Ring. (I think I still have a few of these on a box in my basement. I’ll have to get them out.)
Landslide which was a game about winning a political election.
Kaballah sp.? which was a fortunetelling type of game that had a big swivelling eyeball in the middle of the board.
Clown Around which was a very simple race-around-the-board game for pre-literate toddlers.
Dark Shadows which was a tie-in to the bad TV show. The object was to be the first to assemble a glow-in-the-dark palstic skeleton with pieces you “won” from a coffin.
In my neighborhood, we didn’t really spend a lot of times playing board games though. Mainly we were outside throwing rocks at each other or playing doctor.
shayna the links are not opening.
I did find in my quest for Tip It a site that had complete sets of old board games available. Naturally, I will have to scrounge round to find it again.