SCHOOL'S OUT!!!!

For summer? Or just forever?

(Sorry, I automatically go to the Alice Cooper place when I see that phrase.)

We played Monopoly, and checkers and Chinese checkers, neither of which I remember how to play now. My folks played a card game called Rook, which I never played and have no idea how it's done.

Mostly I spent I my childhood in a self-imposed timeout, in order to avoid other humans as much as possible.

I will still cheat at Solitaire if I'm playing with actual cards....

And I've never seen a kid freak out over a board game more than Chutes and Ladders, holy crap. It's apparently super traumatic to be sent down the chute. I can only imagine if it had been a snake!

I have no memory at all of the moralizing imagery. Subtlety is kind of lost on me sometimes, and I'm sure that was no different as a kid.

Did anyone else have Uncle Wiggly?

We had the Uncle Wiggly game!

Wait, what? In a board game?

This is the thing that bothers me most: it's a game of chance -- spin the wheel, land where it puts you. So adding moral lessons in the form of images (top of a chute shows a child doing something naughty, bottom of a ladder shows a child doing something good) to a destination determined by a random spin of a wheel just makes my skin crawl. Like you're subconsciously being blamed for what's just luck of the draw. It's everything that I find disgusting about American attitudes packaged in a box and fed to our children.

Calvinism, right?

Maybe I'm just as glad we didn't have it. We had enough puritanical moralizing as it was.

The pictures were hilarious. We didn't take them seriously. You can see a photo here: [link]

When we were younger, we played Chutes and Ladders, Sorry!, and Le cochon qui rit, a classic French kids game with pigs (not the one where you roll pigs, but rather you add the eyes, ears, and tail to the pig with certain rolls: [link] And then later, Pit, Battleship, Clue, and eventually Risk. I hated Monopoly even then. There was also this great Scrabble-like game we had called rpm (I think). It had a spinning base and you could add 1 letter to each section as it went by you. If you completed a word, you capped it with a tile of your color. The only game my Dad would play was cribbage.

Speaking of, how could I forget the Game of Life, filled with all of the randomness that Plei was just speaking of.

Yes. Life. And Payday and Careers. Good times