It’s hard to believe in our digital age but there was a time – back in the 1970s – when family entertainment for all generations centred on board games. The main upside of board games was that all ages could get involved bringing the family together for hours on end. The downside was that some of the board games were ridiculously complicated – and frankly a bit boring.
In the mid-70s, Christmas was about getting a new board game that might be football themed or based on a TV show. Anybody remember Colditz – a board game based on the drama series about trying to escape from a German prisoner-of-war camp, based in an old castle? Or the Dad’s Army board game that somehow gamified the sitcom about a Home Guard unit in the Second World War. Palitoy sold a music-themed board game, Top of the Pops.
And then there was the bizarre Mastermind game that bore absolutely no relation to the popular BBC quiz show – produced by Leicester based Invicta Games. The packaging bore the image of a seated man with a women in a cocktail dress standing behind him. At one point in 1976, it was shifting 200,000 units a week!
The king of board games in the 1970s was Monopoly – which dated back to 1903 when it was invented in the United States as The Landlord’s Game. From the 1930s, Monopoly was licensed to Parker Brothers and in Britain, the game was developed for the UK market by Waddingtons. In return, Waddingtons let Parker sell its Cluedo game to its American customers. Monopoly and Cluedo must have been the most played board games at Christmas during that decade.
Games retailed at around £2 but the manufacturers tried to lure us into buying “deluxe” versions and luxury games such as Petropolis – which came in a green leather attache case and was all about buying oil concessions. This was released during the mid-70s oil crisis when the price of fuel quadrupled – so very topical. But I don’t remember anybody buying that game.
However, if you were a child into geo-politics – there was always Risk that let you go conquering the world with very your own army. That was a French originated game, first called La Conquête du Monde and sold by Parker. If invading places was your thing then you could re-live the glories of the Napoleonic wars with Campaign – the rules of which I found so fiendishly complicated that it soon ended up in my parent’s attic. I only found it again after they died and I was clearing the house out!
What was your favourite board game?
