Did you know that I once owned a copy of Trump: The Game?

For all I know, it might still be at my parents’ house, although they’re very good at cleaning out their basement every few years, so it probably left via donation years ago. Good riddance anyway, especially considering current circumstances; besides, I played that game maybe once. In fact, I don’t even remember what it was about other than I assume real estate. And knowing how unoriginal he is, it was probably some second-rate Monopoly rip-off. Then again, there are several second-rate Monopoly rip-offs out there.

I was in Target the other day and wandered by the games aisle, and I noticed how many board games seem to be available as well as how many of them seem to be the same game rebranded or with licensed characters. Many of them clearly are something you’d open up and look at but probably not even touch after you read the very detailed instructions for game play. Then again, I’m pretty sure that Target doesn’t care how many times you play a game you plunked down $39.95 for; the games could be gathering dust in a closet for decades and that store got their money.

I do have more than a few games sitting in my house collecting dust–stuff like the MTV game that’s a party game I couldn’t make heads or tailes of to “teach” everyone the one time we had people over and got into the board games after a few beers. I think we gave up after a few sentences of instructions and then played Superfight or dug out an old Trivial Pursuit game or something. No harm, no foul, I guess, although thinking about that does make me think of all the years I got board games for Christmas and all the years those board games went untouched after Christmas morning. Oh, some definitely got played–I would drag anyone I could into a game of the Young People’s Edition of Trivial Pursuit–but others like Trump: The Game sat on the shelf, forever passed over for another round of Sorry!

When I picture the closet in the basement that had all of our toys, what was always staring back at me from the shelf of board games were classics that got played to death–Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, checkers, Don’t Break the Ice, Mouse Trap, Connect Four, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders–along with a number of others that were popular at the time and became classics or wound up populating Goodwill stores for decades. But we always asked for them and I had enough of them to be able to make a pretty long categorized list, so let’s go.

The Party Games

Pictionary Party Edition: By the time we got this in 1989, Win, Lose, or Draw had been on NBC’s daytime game show block and the original version of Pictionary–which had a game show for kids in 1989 hosted by Brian Robbins–had been around and hugely popular for a few years. By design, Pictionary is a party game, but this version had a white board and a dry erase marker so you could play in “the spotlight” and everyone would watch you draw whatever was on the card, like a dog, a cat, or dignity. Or in the case of my dad’s friend, you’d just write “salad” on the board and call it a night. I think my parents got more use out of this than I did, and I want to say my sister and I just drew random stuff on the white board before the marker eventually dried up.

Outburst: This is one that I had wanted because the commercials were silly and made the game seem like fun.

Outburst debuted in 1986 but I want to say that we didn’t get it until maybe ’87 or ’88, although from the ages of nine, ten, and eleven, I was still more or less too young to get a good game going. There was nothing “adult” about the game per se, but my knowledge of the world was pretty limited at that point and I wasn’t going to e able to rattle off non-Bond Connery movies. But as a kid, I wanted to play the grown-up games that seemed like more fun in commercials than the ones targeted as kids (you know those kids commercials where some snot-nosed brat with a mushroom haircut yells “I win!” God, I hated that kid).

Outburst was basically a backwards version of The 100,000 Pyramid or Taboo. In those games, you giave clues and the player guesses the category; in Outburst, you give the category and the players get points for everything they shout out that is on the card. Like I said, I was too young to know more than half of the stuff on the cards and we maybe got in a few games before I just spent time looking at the cards and trying to guess things for myself before filing it away.

Taboo: Speaking of this type of game, we did at one point own a copy of Taboo, although I don’t remember playing it at home. If you’re unfamiliar with this game, it’s Pyramid but you can’t say certain words (they are “taboo” … get it?). It’s a cool challenge when you think of it, although the last time I played it, I almost got into a fight with people who were being obnoxious assholes with their “ewwww why are you good at this gaaaaaame” bullshit. And I’m not a dick when I play (at least I think so), I just like to actually play the game when you take it out instead of not paying any attention and talking over it. Why would you ask me to play if you’re not going to pay attention? Screw those people and Catch Phrase is a better game anyway.

Scattergories: Of all the non-Trivial Pursuit party games we had, Scattergories got played the most. I don’t remember when we got our copy–probably 1989 or 1990–but my sister and I along with friends, cousins, or anyone else who came to visit, played it. Unlike Outburst, where you had to shout things out, scattegories had you making a list based on a category but all the items had to start with the same letter. You’d announce the category, start the timer, and then everyone would write down their guesses. Then, you’d compare answers and I think if you had the same thing on your list as someone else, you crossed that off. It was thinking on the spot and required some brain power but you didn’t need to know obscure trivia facts or a bunch of TV shows from the Baby Boomer era to play. Honestly, if I came across a copy of this game in a thrift store, I’d probably buy it because I remember it beign an enormous amount of fun–to the point where my sister and I willingly played it together.

The Derivatives

There were some games that weren’t really anything more than repackaged versions of another game. I’m not talking about variations on a theme like how Boggle or Upwords built upon Scrabble. I mean that the game you are playing is more or less the same as a classic game but has an entirely different name or image (and is not a IP-based version of that branded game like Star Wars Monopoly). We had a few of them–many were Monopoly rip-offs–and each was highly desired (at least by me) even if they were barely played.

Axis & Allies: This is essentially Risk but set during World War II. You played as one of the warring powers–The U.S., Great Britain, The Soviet Union, Germany, or Japan–and if there were just a couple of people, you played as more than one country (i.e., two players took the axis and the allies). Much like Risk, you set up armies and squadrons in various places on a world map and then fought over them with the object being to capture the capital territories of your opponents and hold them through a certain number of turns. It was actually more complicated than the average game of Risk because you didn’t just have armies; you had tanks, infantry, bombers, and fighters, and each had a certain amount of firepower. For instance, you’d roll more dice when you were attacking with a bomber than with a fighter.

The problem was that Axis & Allies took an enormous time to set up and could take days to play (kind of like Risk), so it was only for those with board game endurance. I only played it ahandful of times and each time, the game went on for at least two days until someone obtained victory or we decided to have one all-out battle in a specific location. Either way, the only use the game got was when I needed dice for another game that was missing them. I actually held onto this one the longest and only got rid of it a few years ago when I was doing my own clean-out and saw that several pieces were missing so it wasn’t worth the labor of eBay. Off to Goodwill it went.

The Game of Sayville: So this one is so rare and so niche that I couldn’t find a photo of it, even on a local Facebook group, but I think you mgiht be able to picture it when I describe it. Back in 1988 or so, my chamber of commerce put out a board game based on my hometown of Sayville, New York. It was essentially a Monopoly-stype game wehere you went around the board and bought up various stores and businesses in the twon–all of whom sponsored the game. It was something that became available in a number of the local gift shops and other stores around Christmas of that year and so many people I knew had it that I was sure it was just issued to everyone. Well, they did have their names on it, having bought sponsorships via a fund-raising campaign. I don’t think our name was on it.

Anwyay, I remember playing this a few times but really spent more time reading hte box and the different ads that were on the baord, probably because I recognized so many of the places as stores I’d visited whenever I went into town with my dad. Locak kitsch like that is always an interesting thing, and Sayville isn’t the first or last town to get its own “-opoly” game (in fact, there is a “Sayville-opoly” from about 2008 that I found up for sale on eBay). I may have to return to these particular things for a deeper dive one day.

Solarquest: It’s Monopoly iiiiiiin spaaaaaaaaaace!

Solarquest was the “space age real estate game” that cam eout int he mid-1980s and whose premise was … well, you traveled the solar system and bought plaents and moons.

I saw that commercial at least a few dozen times leading up to Christmas and was so psyched when I opened it. There is even footage of me on an old home movie (because we’d gotten our camcorder the same year) holding the game up to the camera and saying “It’s the space-age real estate game” like a complete tool. Hopefully, that footage has been destroyed.

From what I remember, the game was fun to play and since i was obsessed with space as a kid, I loved just about every aspect of it. Come to think of it, Solarquest did have kind of an educational bent. It was also a little more complicated than Monopoly, which is probably why I only played it a few times before it got put on the shelf, repeating a pattern that seems to be happening throughout this blog post.

Anyway, on to the next category.

The Tie-Ins

Finally, there are the branded/franchise/tie-in games. In the 1990s, Parker Brothers and Hasbro would begin putting out licensed editions of their classic games, but for years prior, every television show or movie had a board game as did game shows–after all, the home game was always the consolation prize. And there were board games associated with the most random stuff: Saved by the Bell? The A-Team? All in the Family?

Okay, my sister once got me the Saved by the Bell game as a joke, but I’m amazed that the others even existed. Here’s what I remember having.

Wheel of Fortune (Deluxe Edition): Set up to look exactly like what you saw on the game show, this had a plastic board where you pulled down tabs to reveal letters and pastic wheel with dollar amounts. I could never get it to work right because I think my copy was missing a few pieces that held the board in place. So it never got played; we just sput hte wheel to see where we would land. To this day, it’s the only game show home game I ever owned.

Zaxxon: If you had ColecoVision in the 1980s (which I did not), you probably played Zaxxon, a video game where you piloted a spaceship in combat through various obstacles in order to defeat a big boss robot named … well, Zaxxon. It was fairly popular and I always thought it was cool. So did Milton Bradley because they created a board game version–which I’m not surprised by since video games took a huge chunk out of the board game market. The “analog” version of Zaxxon had you moving your space jet across a board to fight against the robot, which was an action figure-looking piece.

I don’t think I ever played this. If I did, I don’t remember it. All I remember was taking the planes and Zaxxon out of the box and making them have battles like they were my Star Wars toys. Zaxxon the video game shows up in retro arcades (which is where I’ve had a chance to play it in the last few years), but I think it’s more or less fallen into obscurity since the Eighties.

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial: E.T. merch is kind of an odd thing. You have your stuffed animals, posters, books, recoreds, and a notorious Atari 2600 game, but it’s not like the movie demanded a barrage of toys like Return of the Jedi. Still, this was the biggest movie of all time until 1997 and therefore it got the board game treatment. I see this on scans of old toy catalogues all the time and distinctly remember its purple box sitting on the games shelf in our house but very little else. I assume that the object of the game was to collect enough items to get E.T. home. A Speak and Spell was probably involved at some point, too.

I think what surprises me the most is how despite the fact that I rarely played with a number of the games I listed above, I have fond memories of them.