Ten Of The 70 Games I Found In The Attic

“You know, the Parker Brothers took the time to think this all out; I think we should respect the game.” – The Sopranos' Bobby "Bacala" Baccalieri on the Monopoly free parking rule

This week is Spring Break for The Boy and me. Since the weather is still snowy, we needed some indoor entertainment, so I went up into the attic in search of games we might play together.

Mexican Train and Chicken House Domino Game - The name alone intrigues, doesn't it? This is a game I got for Christmas a few years back. It's similar to regular dominoes, except each player works outward from a hub to make his own "train". The hub has a switch which can be set to "TRAIN" or "CHICKEN". Pressing the center of the hub makes either a "toot-toot" or "cluck-cluck" noise. I'm still not sure why. There is no reference in the instruction sheet to the sound options. When I played this with friends, we pressed the hub at random intervals just to distract each other.

Quest For Makuta Bionicle Adventure Game - Because this was one of those games that The Boy would often ask for at the height of his obsession with a particular toy or TV show, I didn't expect it to be as much fun as it is. Quest for Makuta is a complex and ever-changing game with interlocking board pieces, strategic elements, puzzle elements and beautiful graphics.

Pokemon Master Trainer - Another of The Boy's toy tie-in games that turned out to be really enjoyable. The object is to make your way across the board to the Indigo Plateau, catching Pokemon along the way (with the help of dice throws). The Unknown Pokemon Dungeon contains four rare creatures which, if captured, almost assure you of winning -- unless the other player is also able to reach the Dungeon before the game ends. Colorful and fun.

Snail's Pace Race - The Boy got this one when he was very young. Colorful wooden snails race along the board track, advancing when their color is rolled on the two dice. Since it's the snails and not the players who are racing, no one loses. This was perfect for my kid (who, at age 6 or so was known to weep and wail "my career is over!" when games didn't quite go his way).

The Doonesbury Game - I got this back in the early 90's and I don't think I've ever played it. A look at the instruction card might explain why, although I suspect that this is the kind of game that requires a fun gathering of creative people in order to make it enjoyable. And I can't explain why, but creative people never seemed to gather at my house in the early 90's.

Facts In Five - I asked my mom to buy this at a garage sale in the mid-1970's. It was a "Bookshelf Games" edition, which has since gone missing and been replaced with a less-attractively packaged 1964 version I found on ebay. Facts In Five is sort of a more intellectual precursor to Scattergories; players have to fill in a grid with categories across the top and initial letters along the left-hand side. But what categories! 'Artificial Satellites'. 'Scientific/Engineering Organizations'. 'African Military Figures'. I realize now that I grew up wondering if I'd ever be smart enough to play this.

Happiness - Touchy feely I'm OK you're OK free to be you and me pop psychology fun! This game was all about Hang-Ups, Self-Improvement and (curiously) Fate. Six little mini-games on the big 3-D board made it interesting to play. Fun playing pieces, spinners, reward keys and rainbow racks made it a pleasure to look at, too. My stepsister and I would often play this together, the subtext being "Oh, yeah? Well, I'm WAY more self-actualized than you, so there!"

The Bride Game - Gosh, did I ever love this game when I was young. There was something about the art nouveau style of the cards and the soft pastel colors that just captivated the girly-girl side of me. I could never decide whether to be a Formal Evening Bride or an Informal Bride (with that oh-so-chic floppy picture hat). This is another one I was compelled to re-purchase as a grown-up. (I can't ever imagine a time when I might have said "sure, let's throw away the Bride Game", but I guess it happened somehow.)

Tricky Mickey Magic Colorforms - Technically not a game, but I couldn't exclude this childhood favorite. I wonder how many little kids actually tried to amaze their friends with this thing? I mean, by the age of four or five, the concepts of transparency and color matching are pretty much concrete, right? It was still a fun set, though. Now if I could only find the other Disney colorforms I had as a child, featuring Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow and a three-dimensional pop-up stage, I'd be truly fulfilled.


Stay Alive - The original survivor game. The TV commercial featured a group of kids stranded on a desert island, a la Lord Of The Flies. The game washes ashore: "Let's play!" Despite Stay Alive's hideous colors(especially those olive green and burnt orange marbles), I always liked this game. It was a front-porch favorite -- when I was growing up, we kept most of my games on the front porch. It worked out well for rainy days; if I had to come in from playing, I could just pull in a friend or two and we'd be occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

Here's the full list of games I found in my attic this week. So... got any board game memories of your own to share?

Abalone - The Amazing Game Board Book - Backgammon - Barrel of Monkeys - Batman & Robin Monopoly - Battleship - Quest For Makuta Bionicle Adventure Game - Blinkers - Boggle - Brainquest - The Bride Game - Candyland - Chairs - Chess - Chutes And Ladders - Clue - Connect Four - The Couch Potato Game - Cranium Cadoo - Doonesbury - Facts In Five - Fairly OddParents - The Great Dalmuti - Guess Who? - Hands Down - Happiness - Harry Potter Trivia - Jenga - Life - Marvel Trivia - Mastermind - Mexican Train and Chicken House Domino Game - Monopoly - Mousetrap - Nickelodeon Ultimate Trivia - Operation - Outburst - Outburst, Jr. - Pocket Farkel - Pokemon Master Trainer - Pokemon Monopoly - Pop Smarts - Rack-O - Rugrats Uno - Scattergories - Set - Settlers of Catan Travel Edition - Skip-Bo - 'Smath - Snail's Pace Race - Song Burst 50's and 60's Edition - Sorry - Squint - Stage II - Star Wars Epic Duels - Stare - Stay Alive - Stratego - Think 'N' Jump - Tipover - Top Trumps Lord Of The Rings - Top Trumps Simpsons - Top Trumps Star Wars - Total It! - Tri-Ominoes - Trivial Pursuit 20th Anniversary Edition - Trivial Pursuit Volume II - Uno - Wordrop - Yahtzee - Yahtzee Jr. Pokemon Edition

"Enter Easter..."

The First Thing I Read This Morning

The featured poem on Writer's Almanac today affected me more than I can even say. I don't even know what I would wish more: to be able to write like this, or to be written about in this way.

Bad Cats

More cats... I can't help it; they're "my favorite beings" as The Boy used to say. This picture is actually a kitty litter advertisement that I scanned and now use as my wallpaper at work. Click it for the big version.

Spring Awakening

Yesterday afternoon I visited my mom. She still lives in the house where I spent my adolescent and teen years. I used to do a lot of walking in the woods behind our house -- it was where I first felt connected to nature, really.

Sometimes as early as February, the yellow aconite are already popping out through the snow and dead leaves in the woods. Yesterday they were in full, abundant blossom:


Just as lovely, if more delicate, were this crocus and its neighboring crocus-to-be:


Back at home, springtime made itself known mostly through its effect on kitty behavior. Pip wanted out very badly:




Trust was already in the sunny driveway, snuggling the blacktop:


And laid-back Millie, who had been out all Friday night, decided to just curl up on the comforter in a sunny bedroom:


The humans of the house have had to devise a verbal shorthand to keep track of which cats are indoors and which are outside. AKI (pronounced AH-key) means "all kitties in", while AKO (AH-koh) is "all kitties out". Something tells me that more and more AKO days are on the way.

EggsTC.

Easter, equinox, new life... on this sunny day I decided to haul out my big box of paints and pay oval homage to XTC album art of yore. Happy spring to all. In just one more week, we'll have one bonne ideé.

Idea For An Afternoon Outing

Idea for an afternoon outing: wait
until you are in a weepy mood.

Take your car to a picturesque setting
or scenic overlook. Something
with waterfowl is best. Park.
Wish you had something to feed the ducks.

Dial your phone. Call your ex-love and confess
every jealous thought. Be sure to clearly
convey your agony; sniffle a lot.
Insult his girlfriend.
Hang up.

Chew breath mints and drive
to your childhood neighborhood. Sob
at the sight of your old house
wrapped in Tyvek, skateboard ramps
and broken scooters on the lawn.
Blink hard and turn up the stereo.

Pull into the supermarket parking lot
to buy crackers
and make friends with seagulls.

Comical 2

This one's from Glenn McCoy's daily strip, "The Duplex":

"The ardors and arbors of Ardis"

Wow. Put this at the top of my list of "Sites I Wish I Had Created":

Ada Online

My favorite Nabokov novel annotated online. The motif index and especially the images index just make me want to dive back into the text and not resurface until September.

Ada has always been a summer novel for me -- opening it again is the one thing I can always look forward to, vacation or no.

Ten Things Spoiled For Poetry

The green sunlight through August leaves,

Old men on front porches in rocking chairs,

Apples and pumpkins and woodsmoke in autumn,

Stretching cats,

Rainbows,

Any smell emitted from your grandmother's kitchen,

Wandering clouds,

Shipless oceans,

The heart's wisdom,

And that time in summer, just before twilight,

when children's parents call them in to bed.

All Of A Sudden (It's Too Late) - XTC

Comical

Happy birthday, Elton! I wonder who'll walk him down to church?

Okay, this comic made me laugh this morning. It's from a strip called Domestic Abuse by Jeremy Lambros.





Mycomicspage.com is a free subscription site for daily e-mails filled with comic strips -- they let you choose your favorites and there's a nice wide selection.

It's 1974 and the hits are on WTLB-AM

Do the songs kids hear on the radio when they're about 8 or 9 years old stay in their consciousness forever? Around the time the charming portrait on the left was taken, here's what was in heavy rotation on WTLB-AM 1310:

Band on the Run, Beach Baby, Bennie And The Jets, Carefree Highway, Cat's In The Cradle, Clap For The Wolfman, Come Monday, Dark Lady, Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing, Earache My Eye, Hooked On A Feeling (the one by Blue Swede, of course), Jet, Junior's Farm, Life Is A Rock, The Night Chicago Died, Oh My My, Rikki Don't Lose That Number, Rock Me Gently, Rock The Boat, Seasons In The Sun, Sister Mary Elephant, Stop And Smell The Roses, The Streak, Sundown, Sunshine On my Shoulders, Tell Me Something Good, Tin Man, Waterloo, Wildwood Weed, You Haven't Done Nothin'

The Cheech and Chongs and the Jim Staffords among them were just good fun, but some of the more sublime songs still evoke a particular memory or image, even when I hear them today. I'm in my mother's car feeling sad as the wailing synths of "Band on the Run" drift through the dashboard speakers; sitting on my sunny front porch serenading my cat with "Seasons In The Sun", and brushing my ponytails in the morning while "Beach Baby" blasts on my alarm clock radio (alas, it must not have been blasting on the morning of school picture day).

So...what's on your "grade school gold" list?

Happy Birthday, Billy Collins

Here is one of my favorite poems of his; I heard him read it on A Prairie Home Companion a few years ago.


Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

"What's so funny about Biggus Dickus?"

Songs I played as a child on my Magnus organ:

1. Moon River
   
2. Ghost Riders In The Sky
   
3. Sweet Violets
   
4. Nature Boy
   
5. Me And My Shadow
   
6. Tenderly
   
7. Prisoner Of Love
   
8. There Is A Tavern In The Town
   

Community Patron Breakdown

What can I do to make myself look less approachable? Should I get a big ugly nose ring? Forehead studs? A mohawk?

Nick (Nick O'Tine, we're calling him, referencing his odor) is bad enough, but today an entirely different scruffy-looking old man in a red sweatsuit with white hair and a beard was wandering around the library. A staff member wondered out loud what he was doing here. I suggested he might be preparing to hand out presents with his elves.

He lingered at the circulation desk, at the reference desk, and finally at my office door (of course). He noticed my name on my door and asked me about its origin. I told him it was my ex-husband's name and that it was possibly French Canadian. He had a lot to say about the German meanings of my last name, and after saying it all, he asked to sit down (because of his bad leg).

What he was after, apparently, were books about chiggers, lice and other skin parasites that infest humans and pets. He proceeded to tell me about the "pubic crabs" he picked up in the army, and how there was no shame in it, really, as he only got them by sitting on another infected man's bunk. I was horrified, but also trying hard not to laugh. He soon went into such startling and excruciating detail that I really thought I must be dreaming.

"I'll tell you something interesting," he said to me (he must have mistaken my stifled laughter for a yawn) "because you look like an interesting woman. You're an interesting person to look at." Oh, god. I began to type and stare at my screen. He told me about follicle mites, which live in our lashes and brows all the time, without our even noticing. Then I heard all about the dogs he raises. And about all of their parasites.

As I consulted the Internet for him ("I don't know how to run a computer"), he asked me how many times I'd been married. When I told him I preferred not to answer personal questions, he informed me that he didn't relate well to women, not even to his 87-year-old mother. He talked about the trials of being his mother's caregiver as I printed two articles from WebMD for him. I asked him if he'd like to take a walk with me to retrieve his printouts (I sent the job to the printer furthest away from my office).

At the printer, he thanked me, asked if I knew where he could get lessons on running a computer, asked me if there were any library books he could use to research his surname, whether we had any books with coats of arms, and whether he could look up his surname on the Welsh exhibit interactive stations ("Yes! Please go ahead!") even though he wasn't Welsh.

He came back to my office a final time to thank me yet again. What will I do when he returns? Because you just know he will.

Meanwhile, I need to go and Lysol my chair.

In My Life

This week I've been thinking about my earliest awareness of the Beatles. In rough chronological order, here's some of what I can remember:

• My aunt's copy of Meet The Beatles and a few of the orange and yellow label 45s (I think “Yellow Submarine” was one) seemed always to be lying around upstairs at my grandmother's house where I lived. I remember stacking up The Beatles and Johnny Cash and Mister Rogers on the spindle of our fold-up record player, latching the arm over them and letting them drop and play, one by one.

• In the apartment my mom and I had for a while, I remember playing by myself in the back hallway near the stairs and hearing "Hey Jude" on American Top 40 on the radio. This was too late for it to actually be in the charts, so it must have been a long-distance dedication or some other type of featured tune.

• My neighbor across the street, a boy named Johnny, was one of my earliest friends. He had sequential obsessions that he would talk about constantly: airplanes, insects, coins, the revolutionary war, Wacky Packages and, eventually, the Beatles. He seemed to know the names of all of their songs and albums, but I'm sure he didn't own any. He would recount for me the plots of Beatles cartoon episodes (I only remember seeing a few of these myself) and think up original ones, too. I have a very vivid image in my mind of the two of us playing with a set of little lock-together plastic clowns while "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" (which I was sure was a Beatles song) played on the radio.

• Laurie, my friend in fifth and sixth grade, wore Beatles t-shirts to school almost every day and had ALL of their albums. I remember reading a newspaper article about John to her over the phone. It might have been about Sean's birth. I couldn't pronounce "Yoko Ono" at the time -- it was the first time I'd seen the name. About this time I started to notice Beatles movies showing up on cable TV.

• Another friend had the blue and red albums, which I taped with my stepfather's reel-to-reel and played constantly. Soon after, I made my first Beatles purchase: the White Album. I eventually hung the four included portraits in my high school locker. Somewhere in there I also bought Magical Mystery Tour, but I think I may have traded it in for a Doors LP.

• I remember doing research on the Beatles in my junior high school library, finding magazine and newspaper articles about them, but no books that I recall. I bought "In Their Own Words" and "The Beatles Trivia Quiz Book" and had them nearly memorized.

• I sometimes listened to Abbey Road in the high school music room with my tenth-grade boyfriend at lunch.

• I think I got both the Rarities and Double Fantasy albums the year John died. The week after his death, someone stole his picture from my locker.

• My college roommate Alison was a great Beatles fan. She played me all their fan club and Christmas messages and taught me how to play "All Together Now" on her guitar.

• Ten years later, I met my best friend John, one of the foremost Beatles experts anywhere. When we met, he made mix tapes for me including demos and alternate versions of my favorite songs, as well as tapes of his TBH radio show. He went on to write a successful series of books about the Beatles' recorded history and continues to write and publish books about the Beatles. Hell yes, I'm proud of him.

Even after piecing these memories together, I can't really figure out when or how I learned all the words to all of their songs on all of their albums. To me, Beatles music has been something that just exists, like oxygen.