LUCY BURDETTE: We had our grandkids visiting for plus minus a week in July. Most of the time they are way too busy to sit at a table and play a game. (They are nine, seven, and three, and love swimming, boating, jungle gyms, anything active.) But one morning Miss Thea and I needed something to do, so I rustled through the stack of the games we kept from when our kids were small. I wanted to play Parcheesi, but when I opened the box, the board was there, but not a single playing piece.
So we grabbed the next one down, Life. We had pieces and money and the board, but no instructions. I was able to Google it and get a loose idea of how to play. It was quite interesting to explain to Thea about the different jobs and how much you might earn and how much you could then afford for buying a house. She traded away the opportunity to be an artist for police officer. (Ha! I don’t think they make enough money to buy the mansion that she is yearning for.) She also really wanted this log cabin and desperately wanted to get rid of the split level.
I remember playing multiplayer games of Pounce when we would have beach weeks with our relatives. (That’s solitaire with the lead cards put out in the middle so that everybody could play onto them hence the name pounce.) Lots of slapping of cards and yelling. It’s a very good memory!
Do you still have games from your childhood or your children’s childhood? What are your memories of the favorite games you used to play?
Games and grandbabies . . . a perfect fit! We have Life, Chutes and Ladders, and Parcheesi, but the hands-down favorite is my always has been, always will be, all-time favorite . . . Clue.
ReplyDeleteWe have an old Clue but many pieces are missing. It's a great game!
DeleteJigsaw puzzles. It has been a while. I think we played trivia pursuit? Candyland?
ReplyDeletethose are all good ones!
DeleteAs an only child & a sick mom, our family did not keep or play board games. But I occasionally played Monopoly and Clue at friends' homes.
ReplyDeleteAfter my mom got better, we had a tradition of completing big jigsaw puzzles between Christmas & New Year's Dsy holidays.
that's a great tradition Grace!
DeleteWe played lots of games, and when I played solitaire with my two older sisters and our mom, we just called it quadruple solitaire. All those aces in the middle! You had to be fast. We also played Hearts, rummy, Concentration, and Go Fish. Possibly Canasta.
ReplyDeleteWe also played Monopoly, Life, Parcheesi, Chinese checkers, and of course, Clue. I should have known I'd end up writing crime fiction - I tried to peek at other players' lists where you check off what you already know. I was accused of cheating! I would protest that the goal was to be a detective, and if they couldn't keep their lists hidden well enough, it wasn't my fault. (Cue the angel halo...)
Oh Edith, I can see why they were annoyed with you!
DeletePersonally, I like young Edith's reasoning for peaking at the lists of other players.
DeleteEdith you have the detective instincts - I think that would be ok as long as it was part of the rules - in other words, if everyone knew that was ok.
DeleteWe played Life, Monopoly, Scrabble, Trivia Pursuit, Backgammon, Checkers and I know there were more but can't remember.
ReplyDeleteWe had and still have an old metal chinese checkers game. It was a favourite and could take 2 to 6 kids playing at a time. If you tipped the board and made all the marbles tumble you were as good as dead, and required to find and pick up all the marbles by yourself.
DeleteYes, we played Scrabble, too.
DeleteWe introduced our 4 year old grandson to dominos and go fish. Next up: checkers and crazy eights!
ReplyDeleteI loved Sorry – good game, a bit of skill, and didn’t take forever to play so you could get in a few games at a go. Loved Clue, but could rarely find 3 to play – we were split cousin-wise into splits of 2 kids each and you never invited the younger ones. Cards while baby-sitting – gin rummy. My cousin could go for entire summers and never win a game – no card sense and worse luck. Favourite when late in the afternoon, while tired, hungry and grumpy – pick up sticks! Coloured plastic sticks that you dumped in a pile (that was the skill required for the game – to get the best pile to get the best pick. It was always so annoying when the other player got a run and jut cleaned the pile.
ReplyDeleteMargaret - I still want to know how to play dominoes as I think the game must be more complicated than it seems. We just used the tiles to make roads, or stacked them up to make them tumble.
We had tons of games growing up. Card games like War, Go Fish and Rummy and Uno.
ReplyDeleteThen we had board games like checkers, chess, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, Trouble, Life and a bunch of others as well. We had puzzles too.
My favorite was RISK because that involved world domination and of course, why wouldn't I want that? LOL!
Lucy, not that I'm encouraging this of course, but your granddaughter COULD afford that mansion and still be a cop. She'd just have to be a corrupt one. Which is bad but technically if she's good at being bad, she would be able to afford said mansion. Just think of the storytelling possibilities you'd have then. HA!
We played Risk with my sons. I always hated thinking someone was ganging up on me - and sometimes they were!
DeleteAs kids we used to play a game almost every night. The favorite (and most competitive!) was Doghouse, a homemade game my grandpa made.
ReplyDeleteWe played a card game called Spoons as a family when I was a kid. I like Clue, Battleship, I like Dominoes but it is always a challenge to figure out how to score it. I really like Go Fish but my grandkids are getting older and they will play a round or two just to please me!
ReplyDeleteWant to add what a lovely picture Lucy!
DeleteI think we grew up in the golden age of board games. We played checkers and Chinese checkers and monopoly. Then more and more games were created. Clue was my favorite. We played Scrabble, too, but not as competitively as some families.
ReplyDeleteWe played Candyland when our kids were little. They are six years apart so they didn't play very often with one another, only when Rachel came to visit. But Rachel was a whiz at Concentration, and she regularly trounced her dad at both games.
We played cards, of course. My grandmother taught us lots of card games and also lots of different solitaire games. We learned to add pretty quickly as so many games had different number goals.
Got rid of a lot of the games we had in The Great Purge of 2024. It was hard to let go of the Aggravation game, Clue, and Bingo set, Checkers, and Chess set I had had since childhood. We had a lot of the kids’ games…Sorry, Hungry Hungry Hippo, Hands Down, Monopoly, Bop It, Connect Four, Pictionary, Trouble. I think Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land had already bit the dust.
ReplyDeleteI kept the original Trivial Pursuit we received for a wedding gift in 1984 and Scrabble.
What a lovely picture of you and your granddaughter, Lucy!
ReplyDeleteI can't think of any board games I played as a kid. Not really a game, but I remember we had a board with the plastic USA states, so more like a puzzle I suppose. There was a little paper flag on a stick that went into a state piece. That flag had the name of the capital. Then, somewhere, maybe on the board, was the year the state entered the union. I enjoyed that puzzle-game so much. Even today I know all of the capitals and I could tell you which states (this was before Hawaii and Alaska) were the most recent to enter the union.
There was some game, maybe like your Pounce, but it was called Donkey, for some reason. It involved cards being passed rapidly and there were some objects - once it was clothespins, another time I remember it was Brazil nuts - in the center of the table, to be grabbed at a certain point. What I remember is the adults, maybe a cocktail or two was involved, and a lot of loud carrying on. Those people, my parents, aunts and uncles, are all gone now, so I thank you for helping me dredge up that memory.
My most vivid memories of raucous card games is from holidays with another family in Cornwall. They taught us how to play "Racing Demon", which sounds similar to your "Pounce", Lucy. So much fun and laughter. Good times.
ReplyDeleteGreat description Judi of the Donkey/Pounce game. We called it Spoons (as I mentioned above) because we used spoons to grab from the middle. That is such a fun game because everyone has the same chance to win. But it involves a lot of concentration and attention.
ReplyDeleteLove the picture of your granddaughter!
ReplyDeleteMy sister has our very old game of Aggravation. When we were kids, my dad would always use the green marbles and he often wore a green cardigan. For some reason, we dubbed him Cornball Wallis--a reference to the battle of Yorktown and his beloved England's loss of the colonies, Fast forward to modern times and the cardboard game is pretty ratty, but we still use it. My other sister bought a modern 6 person version of Aggravation, which is a little more complicated and still very fun. My brother-in-law has been playing the green marbles and calls himself The Green Wall of Death. Secretly my younger sister and her boyfriend replaced the green marbles with black ones, making my brother-in-law the Black Death. We have had way too much fun with this game over the years.
Almost everyone in our family loves games and we do game nights as often as we can. Another favorite game requires only paper and pens. It may have an actual name, but we call it the circle game. Each person writes a sentence at the top of the paper and passes it to the person next to them. That person draws a picture of the sentence and folds over the original writing so that the third person sees only the picture. They write a sentence and fold again. So it goes around the circle alternating words and pictures until the paper comes back to the original writer. Since none of us are artists and some (clears throat, my son) like to write sentences about lofty concepts, the end result is very different from the beginning. Hilarity ensues. I've kept some of the old papers to look at when I really need to laugh.
Chinese checkers, Monopoly, War and other card games, Bingo, checkers as kids. Older still, Uno, Rummikube, tri-ominoes (we never added points--whoever went out first won), Boggle, Scrabble, Parcheesi. With the nephews, Candyland and Chutes and Ladders and lots of Monopoly--I always lost at Monopoly and nephews were ruthless at Parcheesi. Grandnephew still pays tri-ominoes with me as well as Parcheesi and Boggle. We played Outfoxed--a game where you have clues and suspects and try to keep the fox from winning. But my grandnephew would call the culprit from the first card turned over and be correct every single time! Love the photos, Lucy!
ReplyDeleteOur kids played spit, which sounds like pounce. Very fast and card slapping. We were a great family for games: Uno, Pictionary , Boggle etc. I still play Scrabble any chance I get
ReplyDeleteoh my yes. Ms. Scarlett did it in the Conservatory with a wrench and a double martini.
ReplyDelete