Not much pop for your game buck
We have rousing game breaks around here, quick 20-minute interludes at the dining room table. Many nights have us fighting it out over a board and a spinner or some dice. Our favorite, don’t laugh, is Chutes and Ladders. It’s easy and mindless with just the right mix of suspense and dismay to keep things interesting.
Once in a while, we’ll get out Yahtzee, but we don’t like it as much because it requires adding, and who wants to do that?
So, we went looking for Trouble, the game with the pop-o-matic bubble and the game pieces for chasing each other around the board. We played it when I was a kid – loud and obnoxious battles at my grandmother’s kitchen table where we worried less about getting all our pieces in the winning row than in sending our opponents back to the starting line.
But we couldn’t find our Trouble game last week. So, Grace and I went to Target to get a new one. We pulled it from the shelf, shook it to confirm the pop-o-matic was inside, and paid the eight bucks or so.
What a disappointment. The sturdy, clear plastic game board of my youth was replaced by a crappy bit of cardboard. When moving the pieces around, you have to hold the board in place or it scoots around the table
And the pop-o-matic failed to pop half the time. We had to pound it with our fists to get the die to roll.
What’s happened to our games? TV commercials feature happy families gathered around the table, playing a board game, fist-pumping the air with every winning move. They’re telling us board games = family unity.
What they don’t tell us is the game is a chintzy bit of cardboard.
As with most other modern-day complaints, we can blame technology. All the resources go into smartphone apps and computer games. By comparison, my Chutes and Ladders must seem quaint.
When I was about 7, there was a new game called Hands Down. The commercial showed kids gathered around a game with four hand-shaped levers facing each player. The object was to be the first to smack down your lever before anyone else. I begged my parents to get us one.
That Christmas it was under the tree. It was much smaller than what they showed on TV. I felt I’d been tricked.
On that trip to Target, Grace and I also bought Candy Land. It was the first game I played with my kids when they were little. I hated Candy Land. Many an afternoon, I’d find myself trapped in the land of gumdrops and ice cream cones, secretly hoping someone would just pull the right card so we could end the boredom. Eventually, I took to stacking the deck of cards so that on the third move, my little opponent would draw the Queen Frostine card, thus moving to the end of the path and winning the game.
We opened the new game to find a flimsy board, a cheap plastic spinner, no cards and no Queen Frostine castle. How do they expect me to rig this game?
I suppose everything’s been getting smaller and flimsier all along. But is it too much to ask that the pop-o-matic actually pop?
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.