One way of channeling family competitiveness at holiday gatherings is to bring out a board game and gently coerce people to play it. Though personality traits may pop out in sharper focus, game-induced conflicts almost always devolve into laughter and not arm-wrestling and the shyer members of the clan often blossom in these game situations. Our holiday-time games of choice have been Scrabble — the box even contains historic score sheets from well-remembered matches; Trivial Pursuit (various versions); and Pictionary, in which the clue-sketching can bring on wild hilarity.
Two-person games — from a pocket version of the word-game Boggle to a hand-drawn board for Nine Men’s Morris (also called mill) played with pennies and nickels — have whiled away many an hour in airports and train stations. A 5000-year-old game called Ur has engaged bored nephews for days at a time. And one of the nephews introduced me to Set, a worthy successor to Scan, both of which lay out cards to match, one through memorization and one through deductive logic.
On anyone’s list of the classics are Chess, Checkers, Clue, Life, Risk, Sorry, and Monopoly. The number-one seller worldwide is still the 70-year-old Monopoly, which is licensed in 81 countries and published in 27 languages, including Croatian and Thai. In English, it has been released in more than 100 themed variations, from cartoon characters like SpongeBob, the Simpsons and Family Guy, to dozens of sports-themed editions, many for specific teams, such as the Red Sox, the Patriots, and the Celtics. The longest Monopoly game ever played was 1680 hours long (70 straight days . . . or did they put money and properties in envelopes and come back to it months later, as we often did?)
The Hasbro website (www.hasbro.com/monopoly/) has a fascinating history of the game and lots of “fun facts,” such as the following: Monopoly had a strong following in Cuba until Castro ordered all the sets destroyed. Escape maps, compasses, and files were smuggled into German POW camps in Monopoly games. Parker Brothers once sent an armored car with one million dollars of Monopoly money to a marathon game in Pittsburgh that had run out of funds.
The Hasbro link to Scrabble (www.hasbro.com/scrabble/) has a detailed history of that game, which was first manufactured in an old schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut, in the late 1940s. Sales were limping along in the early ’50s, when the president of Macy’s, so the story goes, discovered it while on vacation and immediately ordered the game for his store. Since then, demand for the game has never slowed.
Risk, a game of strategy similar to war games, was invented in the ‘50s by French film director Albert Lamorisse. Life (often called The Game of Life) has a much longer history, beginning in 1861 as “The Checkered Game of Life,” with a strong moral message. It was re-designed in 1960 (and again in subsequent decades), but its basic goal is to accumulate wealth and reach retirement.
Clue is the American name for a British-designed game called Cluedo. Clue has also gone through many themed variations. The most popular at the moment is Simpsons Clue, with the TV series characters represented on the icons and cards. If you think “Bart” and the various means of murder in this game, it all falls into place. Sorry, based on the ancient game of parcheesi and produced for almost as long as Monopoly in the US, is often seen as a “revenge” game. It is remembered as such in a classic sketch from The Carol Burnett Show, when the players came close to physical blows over saying “sorry.”
Moving beyond these board game chestnuts, there are two new streams of games, one coming from American designers and the other from European (mainly German) designers. The American Cranium has spawned many variations since it was first marketed through Starbucks in the mid-’90s, but the original version was a party game with intergenerational teams. Cranium has been the fastest-selling independent game in history, with celebrity players like Mike Meyers and Julia Roberts helping to keep it popular among adults and teens. Cranium combines 14 kinds of activities, including word puzzles, trivia questions, clay-sculpting, drawing and acting like famous characters. On a different track, Milton Bradley/Hasbro came out with Scattergories in 1988, another party game dealing with words, this time thinking up words that begin with the same letter (indicated on a 20-sided die) but that spread out over 12 categories, all in three minutes. And Apples To Apples, coming out in the late ’90s, has been a popular group game of analogies and comparisons.
