30. ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...70s BOARD GAMES

The absolute very first time I played a board game was probably Totopoly (the horse racing one) in the early 70s. As the youngest in the family, I decided it was my job to move the plastic figures (not just mine but anyone’s who was playing) and had a tendency to snap them in my excitement. This particularly annoyed my Dad because he knew he’d have a fiddly repair job on his hands and the poor horse would end up with blobs of UHU on its hooves. He told me that this was how you mended racehorses with broken legs in the real world but I’d watched the Grand National and knew that a refusal at Becher's Brook and the merest hint of a turned ankle would have the stewards reaching for the bolt gun.

In contrast, the paraphernalia and parts which came with Monopoly and Cluedo were virtually indestructible…..so I lost them instead. We can’t be the only family today who have hand-me-down sets where the Monopoly top hat has been replaced with a Subbuteo figure or a frayed piece of chewed string is sitting in the Cluedo box instead of the lead piping? Not that it stopped Rev Green from using it to bash Mrs Peacock’s brains out. Losing the dice was a different matter and not so easy to compensate for. I ALWAYS lost the dice. They should make an app for your phone in case you...oh, they already have.

I often played Battling Tops with my mates but my mum sold our original game for 5p at a car boot sale without even asking me….which is why she didn’t realise that we’d changed all the names of the tops with biro so that Smitty was no longer Smarty but Shitty, Tricky Dicky was Pricky – in place of both words if I remember – and Hank ended up doing something which was hardly likely to help his performance in the arena.

I paid £50 recently to get a replacement set but I haven’t given it a go yet because it always took SO long to play the blasted thing as a) the string kept breaking and you needed the skills of a seamstress (which were in plentiful supply in the 70s but less so now) to thread it back through and knot it again and b) half the time, the top fell flat on its face as soon as you propelled it through the gate anyway. Or was that just me?

In the old days, we’d quite often play a board game after supper if Mike Yarwood, Dick Emery or the Sweeney weren't on telly. It was meant to calm Dad down after a hard day at work but it usually had the opposite effect, especially if it was Monopoly and he’d been sent straight to jail twice in a row before landing on my property portfolio with its handful of houses and several hotels. He’d insist on playing scrabble with us afterwards and would come up with some unusual words which mum told me not to try looking up in the dictionary.

And at Xmas, after trying to shift portions of pudding from my plate to various hiding places on the dinner table (it helped secure additional helpings with the chance of a foil-wrapped 10p piece inside them) and then watching the seasonal blockbuster on TV (3 years after you’d seen it at the cinema and 20 mins shorter because the BBC were even more draconian than those uptight wankers at the BBFC), we’d play Pictionary and pray that we weren’t the one to pair up with Dad whose drawings were so meticulous that he’d invariably fail to finish them before the egg timer was up.

My absolute favourites though were Treasure of the Pharaohs and Haunted House both of which were based on constructing 4 rooms with 2 inter-locking L-shaped cards on the board. TOTP (ooh, same initials as Top of the Pops) has made several reappearances over the years (though my original became ant fodder in my obviously not-quite-airtight bottom cupboard) but the family now needs to rely on my recollection of the rules which I tend to make up on the spot and so are a little inconsistent, especially if I’ve had a beer or two. So when they ask me what happens when your explorer reaches the bottom of the snake-pit, if it’s theirs, it gets to die a slow and painful death, whereas mine is usually allowed to go straight to the treasure chamber and have a shot at winning the game.

I recently re-purchased Haunted House so that we could play it as a family during lockdown. This was the game where you dropped a ball-bearing down the chimney with its 4 way plastic chute which was meant to randomly feed into one of the rooms, giving your counter a 25% chance of being wiped out. In practice, it would always fall the same way meaning you had a 100% chance of snuffing it if you were in the broomstick room and a free pass everywhere else. That said, even then there was a good chance the ball would miss the broomstick altogether which meant, certainly when it was my counter and my rules, that you were immediately declared the winner. I was so excited to play it again but my kids thought it was crap. Sore losers, I say.

I also fished out my old Mastermind game (the ants clearly found the plastic far less appetising than the other cardboard options) for our lockdown championship. This was the code-breaking game with the sinister James Bond villain and his strangely-alluring Asian temptress on the lid, where your opponent had to guess your 4-colour code by placing plastic pegs in the correct order and in the least amount of attempts. It’s called Mastermind but has nothing to do with scary black chairs and Icelandic interrogators (I didn’t used to know about their tradition of patrilineal naming so I admit to thinking that Mr & Mrs Magnusson must have had a particularly warped sense of humour to call their poor son 'Magnus').

It’s a game of logic, patience and psychological mind-reading. I beat everyone this Xmas except my son who paused long enough from rolling his own fags, creating whisky-based cocktails and admiring his tattoos & piercings to guess my cunning combination in only 3 moves. He then took over Spotify for the rest of the evening and I’m still trying to delete thrash metal songs from my playlist several months later.

It's fair to say that my experiment in weaning my kids off modern electronic games and onto traditional board versions met with mixed success. For one thing, they're a bit clunky (the games not my kids). Any which contain moving parts generally result in you wrecking the whole thing whenever you actually try to move them. Inching up the door to a tomb or spinning a wheel of death sends counters flying and walls crashing down.

They have a lower level of precision too. With electronic games, you have a binary answer to whether you’re successful or not – either you move up a level or, like me, you stay on the same one for days on end as you try to work out how to jump over the ditch without burning yourself to death on the flame thrower. Not so with our old games. Regardless of the rules on height clearance, if you could jam the explorer under the Great Stone of Cheops then you were successfully through to the next room, end of. They’d call it a workaround now.

So now, the only non-electronic game my kids will agree to play is Cards Against Humanity. It's their rules only which makes it tricky for me to cheat anymore. Monopoly, Cluedo and the others, despite their eclectic mix of non-moving moving parts, dodgy substitutes, missing dice and dog-eared community chest cards, will return to being ant fodder. I’d say they don’t know what they’re missing…but sadly they actually do for once.

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Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME......DALLAS

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