Pass the Pigs which was a dice game using tiny plastic pigs and you’d get points on how they landed
I remember my mom made us play the UNgame, shortly after the divorce, and that got us all crying and fighting with each other GOOD TIMES!
Another one I loved as a youngster was Enchanted Forest. You laid out these little plastic trees that had a fairly tale picture on the bottom of them. It was kinda like a concentration game. Whatever card was flipped up, you had to pick the tree with that pic on it.
My family loves Settlers. Didn’t know there was a sequel - hmm.
Another well-loved family game Hotels We loved this game so much that we ragged on my brother when he left it at college - just because most of the pieces were gone, that’s no reason to dump it! My mom bought him another copy from eBay a couple years ago - way overpaid for it, but definitely worth it.
Klondike. Similar to Monopoly but set in the Klondike region during the Gold Rush era. You divided the Prospecting cards into four piles. When you landed on a Prospect space, you got to draw a card. The cards were either worth cash, Fools Gold or had instructions, such as go to a certain building or lose money.
Another one just came to my mind: Scotland Yard. It’s made by one of the European companies and is not available in the United States as far as I know. The game board is a graphical map of London. Each player has a certain pile of tokens for taxis, buses, and subways, which allow them to move various distances. One player is Mr. X, and the other players are detectives attempting to catch Mr. X by landing on the same spot that he’s on. The catch is that Mr. X is only visible at certain times.
I may be being whooshed, but the fact that you wrote “an ute” instead of “a ute” suggests to me you may not have heard the reference:
In the movie My Cousin Vinny, Brooklyn-bred Vinny Gambini (Joe Pesci) is addressing an Alabama courtroom presided over by good-ole-boy Judge Haller. Vinny is defending his two young cousins against a murder rap.
Vinny, while addressing the court, refers to his cousins impersonally as “the two yoots”, which is Brooklynese for “two youths.” Judge Haller wrinkles up his nose, interrupts Vinny’s spiel, and asks “What’s a yoot?”
For people that love to quote movies, the “yoot = youth” thing has been a pretty much constant weapon in their arsenals of wit.
When I was a kid one of my favorite boardgames was “Which Witch?” It had a castle with a chimney in the center of the board, and the pieces moved around the castle (outside and inside) trying to reach the center. At some point if you landed on a particular space you got to drop a marble down the chimney and it would come out in one of four random directions. If it hit one of the playing pieces that person had to go back to the beginning (even if it hit your own piece).
I’ve actually been tempted to buy a copy of this game on Ebay, but it’s always been too expensive for a whim purchase.
My other kid favorites were MouseTrap and Masterpiece.
One of the big two (Parker Bros. or Milton Bradley) released Scotland Yard in the US a while back – I remember buying it from the local Toys 'R Us.
A game with a similar gameplay idea is Clue: The Museum Caper, by Parker Bros. One player is an invisible thief, sneaking around a museum stealing paintings. The other player(s) have investigators, surveilance cameras, and motion detectors to try and catch the thief. It’s not as long to play as Scotland Yard, but fun in a “tournament style” (every player gets to play once as the thief, and the best getaway wins). I’d recommend it if you liked SY.
auntie em, I remember Masterpiece! I only learned years later that all the paintings (at least in the edition we had) were from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Manatee, I think the glow-in-the-dark game you’re thinking of was Green Ghost. We used to love playing with the glowing pieces, even though it was too complicated to actually play the game.
I also remember something called “Voodoo” which had a big voodoo doll with holes in it. Players took turns putting pins in the holes until the hidden mechanism made a little witch doctor pop suddenly out of his hut.
Then there was “The Last Straw” which had players put little colored dowels into the saddlebags on a plastic camel until the camel finally collapsed.
In “Ants in the Pants” you would try to flip these little plastic ants into a big plastic pair of pants. Lots of yuks.
I bought a weird game from E-bay just because it looked really un-pc.
It is called What Shall I Be? * A Career Game for Girls*.
I guess young girls would play this game and choose a career like School Theacher, Stewardess, Actress, Model, or Nurse. You have to collect career chips and ‘personality’ chips and your personality has to match up with your career.
Some of the personality chips read
Good with make-up Good for Model, Actress or Stewardess
Scotland Yard was a blast. Go to the Head of the Class, Cathedral, Axis and Allies and Dark Tower (at least I think what I’m remembering it was Dark Tower) are all fondly remembered.
We had another game that I can’t remember the name of it(although I swore I did when I first started reading this) but each person had a pretty big fat guy with a little open mouth that you put pellets in. When he weighed to much you won(lost?). Any ideas?
Logically enough, this game (which I often played with my brother) was called King Oil.
Another family favorite was Park and Shop. When the game was new, you could buy it for less than one pawn of a car or pedestrian costs today!
Nice to see that The Wacky Races can be enjoyed by video gamers too young to remember the original run of the cartoon series, which also inspired a board game that got plenty of play from my siblings and me.
Actually a game of my father’s and aunts’ “yout”, but passed down to the next generation, was “Cargoes”. You sent miniature metal ships around a circa 1940 world map, trading consignments of radios, automobiles, and other manufactured goods for such raw materials as South African gold and Trinidadian pitch. What a treasure for a young geography/history/transportation geek…