Scoop!

The game though first released in the 1950's was redesigned and remade in the 1960’s and 1980s, and I had the 1980’s version.

Scoop tells of the time, not so long ago, when journalists lived in every city in the world, reporting back to newspapers in their home country. The days before the internet and the early days of telecommunications.

It was exciting, and while it still worked along the original principle of reporters living in different countries that was maybe a little outdated, I didn’t know that when I was 10!

Each player had a newspaper (with some excellent titles like “The Daily Sketch” and “The News Chronicle”) and fun adverts in the paper for “Golden Shred” etc. In a way the game was also a type of nostalgia itself – for a time when the world was a bit simpler, you might say classier.

It was a simple roll dice game, and players had to collect stories and buy and sell and trade them to make money. It actually made me excited about journalism. It bought home to me the way the newspapers and news programmes operate – that they needed to have people all around the world to relate what was going on. That they had to have them living there, just in case.

I never guessed that, I just thought people travelled to where the story was. But before the 1990’s it could take days to get to a place, and by then the story would be over! So, of course you needed someone there.

Rolling a dice and travelling around the world in this game was really informative and insightful, and really fun too!

I really recommend getting your hands on a vintage version of this game (there a lot out there) and playing it with your kids. It almost works as a history lesson about what the world used to be like, but also it teaches them how the world around them works!