Microdot

This was an AMAZING game! Truly amazing. Why, you ask? Well. Quite simply because you got to pretend to be a Secret agent! And collect a futuristic sounding… Microdot to help save your country.

I never had this game but played it at a friend’s birthday party one year and still remember it. In fact, myself and a few friends were so taken with it that we would often do role plays of it in the playground! Yes, we wanted to be secret agents, Yes, like James Bond! Though without the annoying women!

Microdot, invented in 1975 by Parker involved an agent completing a mission to bring a diplomatic bag from enemy territory – this bag had a “microdot” of information in it. Readable with a magnifying glass (to be fair, we kids could read the codes without help from the magnifying glass provided).

You had to collect various objects to help you complete tasks - like wire clippers to cut yourself out of a prison camp, other objects to collect were daggers, ladders, passports,. a revolver. Once you have 5 pieces you could begin.

The aim of the game was to steal the diplomatic bag of any fellow player and get it back to your own headquarters

This really was such a playable game and so much fun to play, it has a special place in my memory. I remember trying to get my mum to buy it, but she said she "couldn’t find it". Hmmm she could do with some sleuthing abilities herself!

It was quite popular in it’s day though and while it was produced in 1975 it lasted well into the mid-eighties.

Even now, it\'s stayed in the collective consciousness, because you can get it as a game on the Iphone!

Although on the Iphone it’s slightly different (I know because I bought it!) and unless my memory is going, there weren’t so many puzzles and activities, they weren’t possible back in 1980!