Arbitrary Grading: Childhood Board Games

Hungry, Hungry Hippos: A+
Hungry, Hungry Hippos encapsulated two of the greatest pleasures of a North American childhood: colourful cartoon hippotami and unremitting gluttony. One of the reasons I like the game so much because it would never be produced today. Health fanatics would complain that it encouraged childhood obesity and inappropriate portion sizes, whilst parents would obsess over the possibility that their darlings would choke on the white marble “hippo food” perfectly sized to lodge in tiny windpipes. Thankfully, this game was made in the ‘80s when they still believed in survival of the fittest.

Mousetrap: C+
I remember how excited I was when I first received Mousetrap for my seventh birthday. I couldn’t wait to build the giant mouse-catching contraption in where cranks turned, levers pulled and plastic boots kicked. Unfortunately, the problem with Mousetrap is that, like the perfect comeback, the contraption never actually worked when it was required. Just when you were ready to unleash all the convoluted mechanical fury of the mousetrap on your hated foe, the elastic band would break or the marble would fall off the plank, and any remaining feelings of technological superiority would crumble as you fumbled with the damn crank.

Twister: A+
Playing Twister in Grade six was great because it gave you a presumably innocent opportunity for the most outrageous physical contact imaginable to your pre-adolescent mind. Putting your left hand on yellow brought you perilously close to your crush’s groin. Right foot on blue required you to stick your ass in your best friend’s face. Twister was always the prelude to a super-crazy session of Spin the Bottle, where people would actually kiss on the lips for 1…2…3…4…5 seconds! You slut!

Monopoly: A
My favourite part of playing Monopoly was choosing my playing piece. I have been known to spend up to half an hour pondering whether I will play as the puppy dog, the horsie or the boot. The fact that I devoted more intense strategizing to securing the top hat as my proxy than, say, buying Park Place probably explain why I remain a diseased Monopoly failure. Another great thing about this game is contemplating what might have happened if Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky had been able to play Monopoly during their formative years. There’s no better way to teach eight-year-olds a healthy respect for slum lords and the crushing inhumanity of the capitalist machine. Thanks, Parker Brothers!

Risk: B+
The problem with Risk is that everyone agrees to play it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Your dad would rather watch the football game but he knows that the hateful holiday mob will not leave him in peace. Your best friend is bored and wants to spend an afternoon away from his own intolerable relations, never suspecting that he could be coerced into a board game. Someone gave you this game for Christmas and you know you need to get some of use out it while there’s still company over. Your mom is being nice, smiling politely, and worrying that the turkey is going to become withered bird husk in the oven. Your douchebag cousin thinks he's fucking Tamburlaine, Scourge of God, and plans to battle it out for the next two months if necessary. The major risk in playing Risk is that over the course of six hours your friends and family will off one another until there is one person remaining, a single player slumped over the board, his face spattered with coagulate gore and his hand neatly tucked into Napoleonic waistcoat.

Trouble: F
Trouble was the game you played when your mom made you go and hang out with the kid no one liked.

Sample conversation:

MOM: Come on. You’re going over to play with your friend, Judy.

ME: Oh, you mean the buck-toothed kid whose mom YOU’RE friends with? But she pinches me!

MOM: Well, honey, if she pinches you, you should try and knock out her teeth. That’s how we survive in this world.

END SCENE

Sadly, if you actually owned Trouble, you were probably that kid. All I can say is goddamn you, Judy Fichtner, you fucking buck-toothed orthodontist’s whore. The only even vaguely cool thing about Trouble was the bubble that you had to pop to roll the dice and the novelty of this faded quickly. What I hated even more than loathsome Judy was the Trouble commercial in which a group of wee Aryan Youth types pretended that playing Trouble was the equivalent of actually getting into trouble, thus momentarily disquieting their Eva Braun-alike soccer mom hausfrau. The big catchphrase was “Oh, oh! You’re in Trouble! It's fun getting into Trouble!” For me, typing those words is the rough equivalent of chewing and swallowing dog vomit, then vomiting it up and eating it again.

Snakes and Ladders: D-
Snakes and Ladders possesses a certain symbolic resonance but as a real game that people occasionally play, it sucks. Not even the schadenfreude one experiences at a rival’s unexpected plummet down the back of a boa constrictor can make up for the fact that Snakes and Ladders is pointless and dull. What precisely is being tested by this game? Your wrist’s ability to repeatedly toss a die? Your equanimity in the face of an apparently arbitrary and meaningless cosmos? Snakes and Ladders makes me feel like Jean Paul Sartre and that’s just depressing.

Barrel Full of Monkeys: B+
Like Mousetrap, the concept of Barrel Full of Monkeys was better than its execution. As a kid, I often found myself so distracted by the glee-inducing idea of plastic monkeys that I would complete ignore the goal of the game and proceed to just make my new simian friends fight and talk in falsetto voices. I suppose this makes Barrel Full of Monkeys a success relative to Snakes and Ladders or god forbid, Trouble, but it still can not compare to the feeding frenzy of Hungry, Hungry Hippos or the hormone-fuelled delights of an innocent game of Twister.