This afternoon Julie asked if I'd play a game with her. Well, actually, she asked if I'd play four games with her—we'd each choose two. First she chose a board game that she made called "Julie's Life," which is absolutely adorable. She won. Then I chose Trouble, and she won again. Then I chose a weird game we have called Step-by-Step Memory, where you have to remember where cards are and pick them up in order to tell a story. I won that one handily—not so much because I have a better memory (I don't), but because she had some unlucky picks. (It's an old game from Milton Bradley, but I couldn't find any evidence of its existence online.) Then she chose War, which she always brags that she's really good at, and I don't have the heart to tell her that it is a 100% luck game. Remember the longest game of War in history? Well, this one was the shortest—I cleaned her clock in about 3 rounds. At one point, she said, "I hate ace wars. They're so stressful."
When I got done, I still had Trouble on the brain, so I tweeted, "Pop-a-matic pops the dice! Pop a six and you move twice!" just for fun, to see if any children of the early '70s were listening. Pam (aka PammyBean on Twitter) wasted no time in tweeting back, "Move your men around the track and try to send the others back!" And then she did me one better and sent me the link to this wonderful YouTube video, which I hoped to splice so I could embed the relevant portion here, but it wouldn't allow me to, so go here and advance to about 9:06. It's exactly as I remember it!
Hey, speaking of games, I thought this was a pretty interesting article.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/26/the-case-against-can.html
Posted by: scott | January 27, 2009 at 06:54 PM
I didn't recognize any of those commercials except the bean game. Probably because I started college in 1970 and wasn't paying attention. Notice how Play-Doh made it clear cooking molds were "for girls" and transportation molds were "for boy". :-)
Posted by: Susan | January 27, 2009 at 09:12 PM
Ooh, Little Kiddles perfumes. I spent hours playing with them! I can still smell the "Sweet Pea" scent.
Posted by: Julie | January 28, 2009 at 06:10 AM
Oh man, that is so funny. We had several of those, and I remember wanting an Ice Bird really badly.
Posted by: Janeen | January 28, 2009 at 10:50 AM
I took to Youtube to show Leah the old "Game of Life" commercial because we still play it, and every time we do the entire jingle goes through my head:
You will learn about life when you play The Game of Life! First you start out with 2,000 and a car...
Kid: I got a car!
You've got a car... Then you may go straight to college, just to get a lot of knowledge...
Brainy kid: "Hah-vud" etc.
Only recently did I realize what the brainy kid was saying! Maybe the marketers figured that thanks to JFK, even midwestern children would get the Boston accent!
Posted by: Sheila | January 28, 2009 at 03:27 PM