Alright, it works like this: List one great childhood game and then one that looked great on the toystore shelf, was played once, and then forever rested on the top shelf of the closet.
I know plenty of folks will ring in with Monopoly -admittedly one of our favorites- but as a tyke, I really enjoyed the game Ker-Plunk! There was this plastic cylinder lined up and down with a series of little holes. You first inserted a bunch of pixie sticks, threading them through the holes and then on top of this web of sticks, you placed a group of marbles. Then you took turns pulling one of sticks out hoping that the marbles DIDN’T fall down -though it was a great spectacle watching them fall- and the winner was the one who had the fewest marbles fall down. Always a blast with the sibs and me.
As for biggest disappointments, there was the game Mousetrap. You first had to rig the trap before-hand which was an elaborate set-up of steel balls rolling down a slide causing a plastic man to dive into a tub which would set off a hammer hitting a little thingy, and so on… until finally the trap came down upon the mouse that landed on the target. Well, the only fun thing about the game was watching the trap finally spring into action. The rest was just a big tease to get there. Having played the game as per the rules once, we would thereafter set up the trap just to see the convoluted production and then even that grew tedious. Humph.
O.K., who’s next?
I am! Wow, how did this thread almost slip by unnoticed?
Looks like you want to keep this to games, rather than toys. Lots of great ones to choose from, but Beat The 8-Ball is the one that popped into my mind. One player releases a marble, designed to look like a small 8-ball, at the top of a funnel, while each of up to four players tries to be the last to release their own marble before the 8-ball falls down through the bottom. The players’ marbles travel down their own chutes, which meet below the funnel. No points (or maybe negative points?) for the marbles that come to rest after the 8-ball drops. Lotsa fun; besides, eight-balls are inherently cool.
I’ve had lots of lame toys, but I’m struggling to come up with a dud game. (I agree that Mousetrap isn’t much of a game, but it serves as a fun toy!) I guess I’ll go with Hungry Hungry Hippos. I didn’t have this game, but I remember enjoying the commercial and someone I knew must have had it because I remember playing it. But it was definitely style over substance; as I recall, everyone just pushed their button to make their hippos chomp over and over and over until all of the marbles had been consumed – no real skill or strategy involved.
Anyone else?
Good grief, the two I would have picked are exactly the ones that minlokwat mentioned in the OP. I would like to add another excellent feature of Ker-plunk, which is that it made a joyfully loud noise when the marbles fell through, making it a great game to play while the adults were trying to talk in the other room.
Operation was another game we liked to play alot, although we deliberately made the buzzer sound by touching the tweezers to the sides of the game, in the pursuit of optimum parental annoyance. We were always losing the little parts, though, and my mom still occasionally turns one up, buried deep within the shag carpet. I should have mentioned this game on the “Things that creeped you out when you were a kid” thread about a month ago, because there was something sort of creepy about performing surgery on a mostly naked, freaked out looking guy with a big red nose.
Another game that didn’t work for more or less the same reasons as Mouse Trap was Which Witch. It had the pieces moving through a haunted house with booby traps along the path. The little plastic parts that were supposed to be the traps, knocking the pieces out of play, quickly ceased to function because their little plastic and cardboard joints were so easily bent out of shape. Neat looking game, though. We saved the board and played dolls on it, or had Luke and Leia explore it.
You’re right, Mousetrap was a dud, as a game anyway. I happened to love the play :). As for a good game, I’d have to go with Careers, which I still play. You go around a track and go into little mini-tracks, each representing a career. You try to get a total of 60 points between Happiness, Fame and Money, which you configured at the start of the game. I tried for 60 happiness once, and lost miserably.