Old School gaming

Over the last six months, John and I have had three sessions playing vintage board games from the 1960s.  Two of these were childhood games of John's and the third I picked up in a charity shop recently.  You can't really compare them with modern games but there is charm and nostalgia in re-visiting them, and certainly still fun to be had.

The first we played was Go.  Not the thousands of years old game with beads but a travel game from Waddingtons.

In this game, players travel the world by various means (after securing visas and tickets) collecting souvenirs.  A big constraint is only being able to make purchases in local currencies and there are incredibly about a dozen different types of "Monopoly money" to trade during the game.

Like several older games, you can be incredibly reliant on a particular dice roll so we made a house rule that made that easier in successive rolls after each time you failed, or else it is possible just to get stuck.

The game has an equivalent of "Chance" and "Community Chest" cards and the added bonus was that the stacks had been supplemented by extra cards devised by John and his brother back in the 70s!

The second game we played was Trek, an expedition game from Spear's in 1960.

The main attraction was the plastic four-wheel drive vehicles, although we were both disappointed to see these were modelled on Jeeps rather than Land Rovers, but they are nice components and complemented by mules and supplies.

James broke the market mechanism in the first turn by buying up most of the stock at the cheapest price which forced the price up to unrealistic levels for John.  Another rule we modified.  And then enjoyed racing from base camp to the unimaginatively-titled destination of "Camp 12".

Our most recent game was the irresistibly-titled Spy Ring, another Waddington's effort from 1965.

This is quite an unusual game.  Players control a spy and a control man who move around a city of sixteen embassies collecting secrets.  The secret cards have a couple of letters on which can be grouped to form the codeword FISH in different languages, with longer words (like POISSON) earning you more points than FISK.  And it that wasn't peculiar enough, when a player rolls a one, his spy has to contact his control man by sending a radio message.  This is signalled by placing an aerial in the spy's hat(!) making him vulnerable for a whole turn, and if spotted, the opposing player can steal a secret card.

The game ends when a player has completed two codewords but they may not win if one of their codewords is short and worth few points (e.g. single character Japanese) as it is the total score that counts.  A nice theme and a fun game to play.  We controlled two cooperating teams each so it would be good to try it with more players.

I've got another couple of 1960s games in the loft - one we played quite a bit 20 years ago, the other never yet tried - so John and I have more vintage gaming to come.