Games

Abandon Ship was great fun, It was made by MB Games or Parker in 1976. You had to evacuate the sinking ship which was made of board and mounted on the sea and swivelled into sinking position below the sea. ...

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Battleship was an exciting strategy board game where you had to try and destroy your opponent's naval fleet by guessing their positions on a large playing area. The playing board comprised two sea areas separated by a vertical screen so ...

The idea behind Battling Tops was that you chose the top part, then chose the spinning part and wound the string around the base. Then you placed it in a notch in the board and pulled real hard (not hard ...

You had a funnel in the middle of the game into which you put a black ball. It spun round and round getting lower and lower in the funnel and then there were four little plastic chutes which all lead ...

Beware the Spider was an electronic game where there was a spider at the top of the unit with a spring activated part. If you touched the base of the game with the fork, as you tried to lift off ...

The object of Bing Bang Boing was to move various size drums, ramps and elevators to make a ball bearing bounce on the drums, roll down ramps and elevators and end up in a cup.I remember the colors of the ...

Fewer games can make me feel stupider quicker than anagram games. 4 year olds have been known to beat me at Scrabble, and on one occasion a Spaniard who only spoke 3 words of English. I have a deep phobia ...

Booby Trap... one false move and...! This game was madeby Waddington. You pulled back the spring-loaded bar and filled it with the coloured pieces. Large pieces were worth 20 points, medium 10 points and small 5 points. Each player took ...

British Bulldog was so favoured as a game of the playground that, like such other greats as Dodgball and Block 123, I remember, it seeped into weekly Brownie meetings and even became the game of choice for games lessons at ...

I always approached a game of Buckaroo with a mixture of excitement and fear. I placed it in the same ‘that made me jump!’ category as other children’s games such as I Vant to Bite Your Finger and Operation. You ...

Parker Brothers made a great game: it was a square cage with four windows on each side and a hole on top, through which a plastic bug was dropped (each player would take turns, dropping a bug in, shouting "BUG ...

Build a Better Burger was a 1980s game where you had to create a burger from rubber burger pieces: bun, burger, lettuce etc. all with the funny rubber bits. And you had to do this before the tall burger tower ...

Cats Eye was a game where you had to fill your cat card with matching coloured marbles, and be the first to place a black marble in your cat's eye.Cats Eye came with a special bowl unit, 4 cat cards ...

Chemistry Sets usually came with some test tubes in a stand, some chemicals, various tools like tweezers and spoons, sometimes a little spirit burner, and a booklet telling you what experiments you could perform. They ranged in size from little ...

Connect 4 was quite a tactical, thoughtful, plotting type game involving a vertical playing area filled with holes, and 42 yellow and red disks.You dropped the disks down into whichever column you fancied, and tried to make a line of ...

Cootie was a popular game in the 80s where the object was to be the first person to assemble a Cootie Bug from the body parts provided. Each player would take turns rolling the Cootie Cube (a die) and would ...

Oh yes! This game rocked. It was like a marble game – in some ways like Zig Zag Zoom, but the game was way more fun in that it pitted you directly against your opponent.So – how did you ...

Crocodile Mile was a great outdoor waterslide which you used during the summer. It had a small kind of paddling pool at the end that was inflated with water where you'd slide into it. I never used to make it ...

The players of Crossbows and Catapaults each started out with a little treasure of some sort that they built a castle around using plastic bricks. You and your opponent would then take turns either launching ammunition at each other's castles ...

This 2 player shooter game was a bit like table hockey except you used guns firing metal pellets to knock the pucks in to the goals. A Crossfire gun was positioned at each end of the playing area and opponents ...

Curse of the Cobra was a nerve-tingling game that involved passing your hand through a couple of "poised" cobras and placing plastic Ankhs into holes in a coffin. If the correct hole was selected the cobras struck and snapped together ...

This ingenious game consisted of a table-like frame, a series of 32 small pieces of 'ice', 1 large piece of 'ice', a couple of mallets and a little iceman figurine. You set up the game frame so that all the ...

Don't Spill the Beans was a simple game of balance and coordination in which the object was to drop 'beans' on to a wobbly pot. The pot was finely balanced so that the weight of the beans on top would ...

Don't Tip The Waiter! was a game featuring a cardboard waiter about 9" high holding a tray above his head. He balanced on a pivot hinge and you had to take turns to carefully load his tray with little disks ...

Dyna Diver was a kind of educational toy where you squeezed a plastic bottle to manoevere a diving bell to pick up treasure and drop them in a basket. I had two of them over a number of years in ...

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Also known as Rod Hulls Emu Game! Emu's head was in the centre of this game and it revolved with its beak opening and closing. Up to four players had to flip coloured tokens into Emu's mouth. The one to ...

Escalado was a horse racing game where you had to strap the course tight to a table and then you turned a handle to make it vibrate and make the metal (lead?!) horses race. You could put bets on to ...

Flipsiders were little cassette tape shaped toys that folded out into a miniature game board with built in mechanism to replace a die.Somewhere in our house we have one that my brother and I would play with in the car ...

I actually had to play this once! Not the best night of my male life, it is perhaps the most girl-centric game I could imagine. The aim of the game is to match teenagers with suitable dates! That’s right, it’s ...

Girl Talk 'The Game of Truth Or Dare' was a boardgame that had truth or dare questions. I also remember it coming with a sheet of red 'zit' stickers to stick on your face. There was also another version of ...

What a great game! Gnip Gnop was ping pong spelled backwards. You tapped the control levers (we seldom tapped but rather slammed our fists down on them) to send the colored ball to the other side. The winner was the ...

Golden Girl the beautiful Argonian princess and leader of the Guardians of the Gemstones - Onyx, Rubee, Jade and Saphire! Together they fight against the evil Dragon Queen and her followers-Vultura, Moth Lady, Wild One and Ogra! ...

Well those boffins at Hasbro really pulled something out of the ... er ... bag here!Surely the lowest common denomiator game for kids, but then, also something that only Children have a passion for. This game was all about - ...

Hands Down was a game with cards and a middle section with 4 plastic hands with matching hand-shaped levers that you could press. I'm not sure I remember the rules, but it had to something do with matching your cards ...

This was an amazing game. It was actually a game of skill, and very advanced for 1967 (when it first hit the market). The box shows a very good looking family of four playing the game (and happy they look ...

Hoppin' Poppies was a game with different colored mushroom-shaped guys that were spring-loaded. You pressed them down and they popped up in a few seconds. You ended up with Hoppin' Poppies all over the house! ...

This was a stand-up cut out in the shape of a dishevelled cowboy (if memory serves me right). There were holes at his mouth, and his 'drawn' pistols. It was basically a game where you had to throw the balls ...

Boardgames used to made of tough stuff and there was one in particular that was really put through the wringer and came out the other end, mostly, bar a few snapped off black levers. This was Hungry Hungry Hippos, a ...

Instant Insanity! This is not the effect of watching Jeremy Kyle, nope this was a puzzle game that could cause legitimate insanity (Well, almost)The puzzle consisted of four cubes with different coloured faces (red, blue, green, and white). The ...

The game of Jaws could be put in the same camp as Buckaroo or Operation - all three had the effect of leaving you a nervous wreck by the end. Of course, this was made even worse by the game's ...

Jimmy was an electronic football game, shaped like a stadium with key pads at either end and red diodes on the pitch to represent the players. It played a mean game of footy and lights flashed and music played when ...

So, he didn't quite have the looks to go with it, but Johnny Hotshot often put Roy Of The Rovers to shame with his amazing footballing skills. The game basically comprised a large football player about a foot high, with ...

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For a game that resembled the contents of your grannies knitting set - along with the marbles she lost years ago - Kerplunk hasn't done too badly in the popularity stakes.I'd be grasping at straws if I in any way ...

Madcat Marathon was a maze game. The object was to get the ball over and through obstacles from start to finish. The main body of the game was made of blue plastic with yellow obstacles. The game's shape was about ...

While some kids wrote to Russell Grant for guidance, and others turned to the pages of Jackie for theirs (or even went to the trouble of making those paper fortune-teller pyramid thingys that were so popular in the 80s and ...

Basically, Magic Robot was a number of large paper cards with a reflective disc in the middle. This is where you placed the robot. The robot had a wand/stick in his hand and you pointed this to the question, let ...