Board games were always a thing with my family growing up. I remember when I got the board game Risk for my birthday and, not knowing the obvious advantages of going for North America or Australia early, played for five hours until sets of cards were worth eighty armies. Ridiculous.
Some of the board games tried to incorporate cutting edge technology. I remember Touche which used magnets to flip over pieces and Electronic Intercept which was like Battleship using lights.
The best ones of all were handheld games. I remember a version of Space Invaders, Electronic Quarterback (which dot is the receiver?), baseball and Head To Head Hockey. Just a few dots on a screen, but at the time it felt very vaguely like the future as promised by campy TV shows.
Did anyone else waste countless hours playing these simple games? Any others you remember fondly? I still think the DS Lite was a brilliant piece of technology.
I had a baseball game with only two buttons, “hit” and “run”. Whether you got a hit or not was (I think) down to timing, and then depending on where the hit went and what bases were occupied, you could try to stretch a single into a double or even triple by holding down the “run” button. The optimal rules for when to do so were very simple (for instance, a line drive with someone on second but nobody on first, you could always stretch into a triple), so it wasn’t much of a game. I played a lot of it mostly just because I didn’t have any other portable games.
I had the 9 in one Merlin. (A few years ago I got Merlin the 10th quest). I had the pocket LCD Dungeons & Dragons game (still have it. still loads of fun). LCD pocket Burgertime. An LCD pocket game featuring Sprout, The Jolly Green Giant’s Son. I had Wildfire, a pinball game using red LEDs. I had Fire Away, a wonderful Space Invaders clone using a very complicated nixie tube.
A few years ago, I bought the electronic board game Omega Virus. I still haven’t gotten around to playing it.
Probably because of the buttons numbered 1-9, although I suppose there could have been a later edition that did have 9 games. The Merlin I had had six, though; and the commercial I linked to is the one that got wedged in my memory in childhood.
I had a bunch of those electronic games. A football one a base ball one and even a boxing one. What I really wanted was those mini table top arcade cabinet games like Donkey Kong etc. I saw the, in many a Christmas Catalog but never in real life.
Where’s Merlin now? Daddy, come clean.
In the kitchen with Mom, playing Music Machine.
Used to want one of those. But I’ll bet your Mom never played Music Machine. on it. I also wanted those mini-arcade games. And those chocolate alphabet initials.
Didn’t even know there were portable RPGs but the tabletop dice game was better.
I got one of the old Nintendo Donkey Kong table top games a few years ago. The battery compartment lid is missing. Some of the stickers are peeling off. It still works and is fun to play.
NOTE- The following is just the first picture to come up and is NOT my E Bay listing
Sure, why not? I can’t say I’m very familiar with electric games, but all are welcome in this thread.
What about mechanical games? Almost every male Canadian kid my age grew up with a tabletop game of hockey. Long rods were used to move the players within slots and make them spin around to pass and shoot the puck. Goalies just moved from side to side. None of my friends had the elaborate versions with electronic lights and scoreboard or plastic domes - which you did not exactly need. I have literally no idea if these games are still even a little popular, but in our digital era am guessing “nope”. You sometimes still see a high end version in pubs.
It was basically similar to Subbuteo (a British tabletop football/soccer game using the same ideas). At a garage sale in the early 80s I bought a basketball version where you tried to get the ball into a hole in the paint and then catapult it into the basket.
.jpg){kind=link}