Toys and Games

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Rob Houghton
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Rob Houghton »

That's right - the only time the answer is checked, by the 'accuser' is if no one has any of the three cards asked for. If that happens, it is presumed that the guesser has guessed 'whodunit'. BUT - players can 'bluff' by including one of their own cards in their accusation, so as to discover other cards that other players might not have shown. My mom used to 'bluff' a lot - sometimes naming two cards she was holding, in order to discover the third. When we played with a friend of ours, he always got mad when anyone bluffed, as he felt it was 'cheating'! :lol:

I have a big soft-spot for 'Cluedo' - as it was designed by a man who lived in King Heath, not many miles from where I live. He sold the rights to Waddingtons in the late 1940's for £5,000, which seemed a lot then - but his family have never made any money out of it since! :-(
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Katharine
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Katharine »

I don't think I explained myself very clearly. I have only played it a couple of times when someone was 'out'. Once it was me. I'd asked round and no-one said they had any of the cards I asked for. I knew I didn't have any of them myself, so I looked in the sleeve expecting to find I was correct, but I wasn't. I didn't disclose them to anyone else, but had to put them back and was then out for the rest of the game. I just showed my own cards to anyone who made an accusation about a card I possessed. At the end of the game when someone eventually made the correct accusation, it turned out that someone had said they hadn't got a certain card that I'd asked for, which is why I got it wrong. They didn't do it intentionally, they just hadn't checked their cards carefully. :cry:
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Courtenay »

Yes, Cluedo always worked for us too and was a family favourite — I don't recall anything ever going amiss with how we played it.

That reminds me of how we also had a "Murder, She Wrote" board game, which was a little more complicated. Out of the up to six players, one was the murderer — who would "murder" a selection of the village folk illustrated around the board during the course of the game — while the other players were all "Jessica Fletchers" who had to figure out who the murderer was before he/she committed a certain number of murders and escaped. A couple of memorable times, the game went spectacularly wrong. Once I and my sister and our two cousins were playing for ages, only to eventually discover that we were all Jessicas and there was no murderer (Dad, who set up the board, had neglected to put the murderer card in). :shock:

Another time, I decided to cheat and make sure I was the murderer (which was the most fun role, of course :twisted: ), so at the beginning of the game, when we each had to go into the room alone and check our character card secretly (so the murderer could commit one initial "murder" with no-one knowing), I swapped the players' cards around to give myself the murderer one. Unbeknownst to me, whoever was originally the murderer had already seen his/her card — and my auntie, who went in after me, had also decided to cheat in the same way. So the game opened with a couple of cries of "Hey, I thought I was the murderer!!" and both cheats were quickly exposed, to everyone's hilarity... :oops: :mrgreen: (I never tried that trick again, I can assure you. :wink: )
Last edited by Courtenay on 13 Sep 2017, 18:14, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Courtenay »

Rob Houghton wrote:Once of the best quality games I have is The Enchanted Forest game made by Ravensburger. So sturdy and beautifully decorated too! I've had it for many years - and I'm sure I was influenced in buying it by Enid Blyton's Enchanted Wood!

Image
This looks fantastic, Rob — I wish we'd had it when I was little! :D I've always enjoyed all sorts of board games — we were and are avid players of a whole range of them in my family — but I don't think we ever had any with a magic/fantasy theme, which I would especially have loved, being a fan of the Faraway Tree too.
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Rob Houghton
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Rob Houghton »

It was a simple game really - players were the King's messengers and had to search for the fairy-tale item turned up on a card - which was hidden under one of the trees. It was basically a memory game, but also had magic elements - if you threw a double number (on two dice) then you could transport yourself anywhere you liked. Also, if you landed on another counter's space, you had to send them back to the castle. Sometimes this delayed them, but if they'd already found the item, it helped them to win that round. :-)
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Courtenay »

Sounds like my sort of game, then — I was always very good at memory games as a child and used to win them the most often, to the rest of my family's regular annoyance! :twisted: :wink:
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Domino »

Another game was Sigma File, which dates from 1973. It was best played by four players, representing the four main espionage agencies in the Cold War period: London, Washington, Moscow and Peking (now called Beijing). In the original version there was a male and female agent of British, American, Russian and Chinese nationality. The board consisted of a number of exotic cities throughout the world all inter-connected and in the centre was Tangier, where a briefcase containing the vital Sigma File starts. The game looked like this:

Image

The big twist was that any of the agents could be controlled by any of the four players. On a player's turn he could either move an agent to an adjacent city or make a secret payment to one. Each player had the sum of £10,000 to spend. The first agent to reach Tangier picks up the briefcase, which then moves with him / her. If a player doesn't like the direction an agent is being moved, he can challenge it. So as not to reveal exactly how much a player has paid an agent, this is done by way of an auction, until one player cannot (or chooses not to) bid any more. If an agent is in the same city as another, he or she can be instructed to kill the other (the player must have paid the killer at least £1000), but again this can be challenged. The winner is the player who gets the briefcase back to his home city, no matter which agent is carrying it. There is scope for all sorts of bluff and skulduggery in this game.
A second edition of the game was brought out a few years later, where there were eight male agents in different colours and the board was in a geographical layout. It looked like this:

Image

At some later date, it was renamed Conspiracy.

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Re: Toys and Games

Post by IceMaiden »

Seeing all these board games has reminded me of one I had:

Image

It's a fairly simple little game where the idea is to chase other rabbits, catch them and be the last one standing while avoiding being caught yourself. Basically it consisted of four different coloured rabbit counters and several cardboard disks to correspond with each colour. You set them up in a circle and each disk has either a number or instruction on the underneath. You lift up the disk directly in front of your rabbit and follow what it says, either you move forward 1,2 or 3 spaces, stop or there's a switch option which lets you swap two disks around. If you remember well you can use this to put a stop in front of another rabbit in order to catch it, and each time one is out you remove all that rabbit colour's disks so your circle gets smaller and increasingly harder to avoid the others.

I spotted this in the window of a local shop that sold baby clothes and was drawn to it because of the picture on the box. It was the ony one they had in and I've never seen another anywhere.
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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

It's fun reading about all these games. The Sigma File sounds particularly interesting and I like the look of the agents! It adds to the enjoyment of a game if the board/cards/pieces are attractively designed.

Cluedo has always been a favourite in our family. When I was a child we had an edition where the characters (Professor Plum, Mrs. White, etc.) were just plain plastic pieces in different colours, shaped rather like Chess pawns. However, the version we've got now (which we've had since our children were small) has little models of the characters, which I really like:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4c/b7/46 ... 57221d.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

One of the most beautifully-designed games we've got is The Nancy Drew Mystery Game:

http://www.nancydrewsleuth.com/ndgamefulldisplay.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Rob Houghton
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Rob Houghton »

A game I had as a child, which I bought from a jumble sale, and played quite often, was 'On The Buses' - a programme I had rarely watched, but we enjoyed the game! It was quite attractively produced, and involved picking up passengers in a bus...but I don't remember much more about it! I think I lost a lot of the pieces and it ended up being thrown away - unusual for me, as I still have some games I had aged about 4 or 5!

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'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Rob Houghton
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Rob Houghton »

I also had the 'Alley Cats' game - where you went around looking in bins for fish! :-D

Image

As can be just about seen in this photo, some bins had bulldogs hiding in them - which wasn't good, as they would then chase you! Also, other cats would steal your fish if you weren't careful!
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

I hadn't heard of the Alley Cats or On the Buses games before but they look fun.
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Wolfgang »

I bought the German version of "Sid Meier’s Civilization: A New Dawn Review" which looks like that: https://www.boardgamequest.com/sid-meie ... wn-review/. Let's see when I'll find the time to test it.
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Courtenay »

Ooer, that game looks far too complicated for me, Wolfgang, but good luck with it. I'll stick to Cluedo myself. :shock: :wink:
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Re: Toys and Games

Post by Stephen »

Funny this thread has been revived because only last week I was reminiscing with my sister about the old toys we used to have as children. I was especially pleased to remember the name of this one...

Image

...where you have to repeatedly flick your marble up and bring down your four cars in their respective lanes before your opponent. I think I was only about five myself when I got this, but I see the suggested age goes up to 14. Can you imagine the average 14 year old today enjoying this?
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