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!
DeleteThank you, Lucy
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.
DeleteThat halo is still glowing…each time one of your fictional sleuths “snoops”! Elisabeth
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!
ReplyDeletePerfect choices!
DeleteI 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.
Yes we played Sorry too!
DeleteWe 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!
DeleteJay, I think I'll wait to suggest the corruption to the grandkids:). We did love Risk, especially my older sister, who usually won.
DeleteAs kids we used to play a game almost every night. The favorite (and most competitive!) was Doghouse, a homemade game my grandpa made.
ReplyDeletetell us more about that!
DeleteWe 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!
Deletethank you! We played spoons too. Next time we visit with them, must play more games...
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.
Concentration! Have not thought about that game in decades. We had a well-worn Password game I'd also forgotten about.
DeleteWe visit with the kids using an app called Caribou that has lots of matching games. We are realizing how slow our brains are getting in comparison:)
DeleteGot 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.
I think I still have our 1984 version of Trivial Pursuit, Brenda! The problem with trying to play it with our son, born in 1998, is that the entertainment (or whatever the category for television and movies is) were way out of his frame of reference. You have to play that game with your own contemporaries. — Pat S
DeletePat, we moved to a 55+ active adult community so we have lots of contemporaries. Also I think you can purchase add-on sets of cards from different decades.
DeleteWhat 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.
Love the idea of the states puzzle! Yes, cocktails were definitely involved with our elders...
DeleteMy 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.
We call that game Fax Machine, Gillian! It's hilarious
DeleteNever heard of that, but it sounds like fun!
DeleteChinese 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
ReplyDeleteI adore Boggle and that reminds me of a greater favorite, bananagrams!
Deleteoh my yes. Ms. Scarlett did it in the Conservatory with a wrench and a double martini.
ReplyDeleteCoralee, mixing fact and fiction in my brain. The game character and Miss Scarlett the PBS detective! Elisabeth
DeleteOh, Coralee, that reminded me of a real wedding in a lovely conservatory. The groom's last name is Peacock. I mentioned to the bride that she was soon to be Mrs. Peacock in the Conservatory. She replied, "Let's hope there aren't any murders!"
DeleteSome fun memories about playing games! As the oldest of four and mom of three, I played an inordinate number of Chutes & Ladders games in my life. LOL
ReplyDeleteSteve and I used to love to play Scrabble, but we haven't played in years. We should restart that. When the girls were young we went to a local pizza place every Friday evening. On each table was a handful of crayons to use on the paper table cover, and a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards. While we waited for our pizza the girls would draw while we asked each other the questions on the cards--mostly they asked me. It was a lot more fun than actually playing the game, which can be an interminably long process.
One Christmas we were all snowed in together in Michigan, with four generations of family members. My daughter had just gotten an Apples to Apples game, and we had the best time playing it for hours. We've played it again several times, but that first experience was so epic we could never match it.
We lost power for week after a surprise Halloween snow storm dumped a foot of snow on trees still fully leafed. Irwin and I played Scrabble every night by candlelight. We were not cold, hungry or in danger, so it was fun for us.
DeleteI think I remember that storm Judy!
DeleteJudy, your playing Scrabble through a power outage reminds me of a college bridge game that had started before a massive east coast power outage (mid-1960s). When we chorused, “Get the candles and keep dealing!” Elisabeth
DeleteAs an only child who lived in a neighborhood that only had other children seasonally in the summer, not many favorite board games. Solitaire, solitaire Chinese checkers. and when visiting my grandmother, Monopoly circa mid-1920s. Grammie was a cutthroat player! My widest board game experience came when I mentored in a school sponsored program…Game of Life and Uno. Happy Sunday, All. Elisabeth
ReplyDeletethanks Elisabeth!
DeleteI think we played played more card games than board games. I remember double deck rummy with my mom's extended Washington family during rainy days at the lake. Spoons was also played double deck.
ReplyDeleteMy son had the same games mentioned above (Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, checkers, et al), but he had a game with a battery powered dragon - maybe called Dragon Strike? The dragon’s long neck would move around in a different pattern every time and knock over your pieces but not your opponent’s which meant you’d have to start over. That was fun for child and adult alike.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid, we played board games and card games more than I remember my son playing with his friends. Many a rainy weekend day was spent in marathon Monopoly games. And Clue! (Love your addition to the accusation of Ms. Scarlett, Coralee!) One game no one ever seems to have played is Pit. It’s a special set of cards (like Uno needs its own cards) and emulates the stock exchange floor with trading and yelling. I played it with my friend’s family when I went on vacation with them the summer after seventh grade. Luckily we were in a cabin away from other people because we were rowdy! I bought the game a few years ago for my family, but we’ve never played it. — Pat S
Oh yes, we played Pit too! Two two two, three three three and so on...
DeleteOh, absolutely! We were big on Monopoly. And CLUE! And oh, we loved Battleships, which we played on paper. And Mad Libs. And oh, yes, I have our original Trivial Pursuits, too, although gosh, it came out in ..the late 70's? Early 80s? So it was with friends, not family.
ReplyDeleteAlso we played a game we made up called Its not the Brooklyn Dodgers. Which had someone say, for instance, it's not the Brooklyn Dodgers, it's the Brookfield Zoo. Then the next person would have to come up with something adjacent, and say, for instance, it's not the Brookfield Zoo, it's the Lincoln Park Zoo And the next person would say: It's not the Lincoln Park Zoo, it's Abraham Lincoln. Then: It's not Abraham Lincoln, its a Lincoln Continental. And so on. FOR A VERY LONG TIME! Until someone couldn't answer fast enough.
You'd have to pay attention to that one Hank, and also know the rules!
DeleteYesterday I played a card game with my grandson Jody - Skip Bo - and I have no idea what the rules were. Felt like they changed depending on tge cards Jody got. But we had fun.
ReplyDeleteLOL...I love when the so-called rules of the game fall in the grandchildren's favor, Hallie. Or they just create a game on their own. Close friends of ours just returned from a family vacation on Block Island. Their two little grandchildren were in the back seat of the car playing a game they made up using coasters. The conversation between the two of them were hilarious as the rules rolled out and the game made zero sense. :-)
DeleteI loved board games growing up; in particular, Monopoly and Checkers (which I played with my Uncle Otto when visiting him and my Aunt Dot during summer vacations). Even now I can "while away" an afternoon in Barnes & Noble in the game section. Since there are now close to 20 great nieces and nephews in our family I pick out one board game for each family at Christmas time. It can be challenging especially when the ages are really spaced out in each family but that's half the fun of making the final selections. If I don't select board games as gifts I switch to Jigsaw puzzles...the more pieces the better. They love putting a large puzzle together as a family unit. Bu the way, Lucy, I love your childhood memory photo...You "squished" in the center of everyone and the family pets. Everyone is smiling; such a joyful and nostalgic picture!
ReplyDeleteWhen we got together, my cousin and I would sit cross-legged on opposite ends of Grandma's cedar chest and play double solitaire. I have that chest now and am amazed at how we both fit on it.
ReplyDeleteI come from a family of card players, we all started with with War as soon as we could read the numbers and graduated to Oh, Hell, Rummy, Crazy Eights, Countdown and the big adult game, Canasta. My grandmother was such a Canasta fan she had these lovely red card holders made of some sort of early plastic so you could see your whole huge hand (Canasta is a two-deck game) without cramping your thumbs.
ReplyDeleteFor board games, it was, of course, Monopoly, and also The Game of Life, Parcheesi, Sorry (with the dice-popper thing in the middle, does anyone remember those?) and Backgammon. LOTS of backgammon with my siblings.
I'm still a huge fan, and in fact I try to get together with Victoria and her wife, my friend Samantha, and anyone else who wants in for board game night once a month.
Monoply, or course! I wonder what happened to our Monoply game? And Clue, the genesis of all of us mystery writers, I'm sure. Scrabble, and Gin Rummy with my dad and my grandmother. My dad taught me to play chess but I was never very good at it, nor at the domino game 42, which was my parents' favorite. My daughter loves board games and we played most of the ones mentioned. Christmas before last I gave her a deluxe Scrabble set, but I think we've only managed to play it together once. My favorite was always Trivial Pursuit and I still have my original game. I can't imagine how out of date all the questions must be now!
ReplyDeleteLucy, I meant to say what adorable photos!
DeleteLucy/Roberta, are you the little girl in glasses in the middle as Evelyn guessed? — Pat S
ReplyDeleteWe played card games as kids and read books when we were not outside riding bikes or just hanging out with the neighborhood kids. We only took a day trip to the beach occasionally. So, there were no cottages and sleepovers to deal with. I do remember puzzles that our friends kids loved along with Lincoln Logs!
ReplyDeleteMy sister and I played Go Fish and Chinese checkers for hours.
ReplyDelete