I think my favorite was Dealer’s Choice. It was a game where cars were bought and sold. Each player had a bluebook, so a Bugatti might be valuable to me but junk to you.
Boss was interesting. Each player started out in the mail room and worked his way up to the head of the corporation. You could either accumulate various objects to get promotions, or you could buy 51% of the company stock.
There was a spy game (I forgot the name) where you would roll dice and move your spy that many spaces around a map of a building. Certain random spaces would trip an alarm (with a battery-powered bell) and you get “caught” and have to go back to the starting space.
Camp Grenada was just weird. It had a little bus that you’d move around the board, and it would randomly break down. Where it broke down (the front came off) would determine your actions for your turn. I never really learned the rules, but I think the object was to collect little rubber mice, snakes, and lizards.
The Uncle Wiggily Game. We could only play it at our paternal grandparents’ apartment, as they had the only copy I ever saw. It was one of a surprising assortment of odd, cool toys they had for us to play with.
Scoop! , a game about the newspaper industry. All I really remember about it is that it had a really nifty cardboard telephone, the individual newspaper stories were funny, and that I’ve never seen another copy of the game.
I liked a game so obscure I can’t remember the name of it. Basically, you and several other players controlled countries in an island in the center of the map called “The Old World”, and you were competing with each other and with random events that took place in the surrounding islands/continents called “The New World”. I couldnt ever find anyone to play it with me, as even at 7 years old it was too complicated for the adults to understand.
Klondike. Monopoly-esque board game with saloons. In my family, the object was to cheat as much as possible and not get caught.
Bonkers. I don’t know how obscure that one was but I loved it.
Careers. This was one of those games around the house (like Clue) that I didn’t know how to play but used it to play with, if that makes sense. It was an old version and I just liked tinkering with the pieces until I got bored.
I had the Star Wars Escape from the Death Star board game and played it to bits. That or my mom tossed it, like she tended to do with a lot of my belongings when she deemed I had outgrown them.
And I know it’s not obscure but my overall favourite one was Stop Thief. I got so good at it that I couldn’t play it anymore because I knew where the thief was almost right away.
There was also a couple of french games that I really enjoyed. All I can remember was that one of them involved a parrot, the other had to do with countries of the world. I have no idea what they were called.
I had two games which have become two of the most collectable board games from the 1980’s: Fireball Island and Dark Tower.
Fireball Island was a pretty simple roll and move race game. The twist was that when you rolled a 1 you pushed a marble out of the mouth of a statue in the middle of the island which would then speed down different paths and potentially collide with racers sending them back.
Dark Tower was a kind of fantasy war game where players moved around a map searching for magical keys. The dark tower of the title was a primitive computer that sat in the middle of the board and kept track of different aspects of the game. It handled combat, shopping, and what treasures you found and showed the player what was going on by a light up “stained glass window” display (really there was a back lit wheel with all the possible options that spun inside it).
I don’t feel too bad about not having these games now since I played them to death; they wouldn’t be worth a small fortune if kids just kept them in their boxes to accumulate value.
Oh, I had to get that one after visting a friend and we played his. Ordering it from Sears was a bit of a headache but worth it, one of the few board games that could really be enjoyed solo.
That’s the game I was going to mention and I quite liked it. Especially the “formula for success” where you got to choose what combination of fame, money, and happiness served as your ultimate goal. I thought that was a really interesting game mechanic when I was a kid and it fit in well with the game.
I had Green Ghost! It cost FIVE DOLLARS, which I had gotten for my birthday from my Grandma. That was astronomical. Otherwise I would never have been able to get it, because $2.98 was about average for a board game. I remember being in school and being happy all day because that night we were going to Monkey Ward and getting Green Ghost!