board game

It’s the Fourth of July, and after a nice dinner out, my parents, the Wifey, and I were trying to figure out what to do next.    We settled on board games, and since we’ve got quite a collection, the four of us returned to my house.   The first game up was the Happy Days boardgame — just to warm up — and after three games, if I might blow my horn, I won twice.

After my second win we decided to play something else.   Two Saturdays ago, we had stopped at a church rummage sale.  It was late in the day, and the ladies in charge were sizing up the task of loading up the leftovers, so they were ready to get rid of it any way they could.   They had resorted to $5 a bag, whatever you could fit in it, and, heck, even if it didn’t fit, $5 meant they didn’t have to lift it again.   As you might guess, we started throwing everything we could find into that grocery bag.   Besides the books and various sundries, I added an old edition of Password, the home edition of the TV game show.   I didn’t bother looking if everything was inside, because at that point it was technically “free”, so when it got home it automatically went on to the games pile.

So, tonight, when it was time to pick a new game, everyone seemed most attracted to trying out Password.  Everyone took various bathroom / smoke / take-the-dogs-out breaks while I reviewed the box’s contents and evaluated if it was playable.    The game is remarkably simple: you have two “viewers”, which contain red filters, and two stacks of cards with the red-blue jumbles printed on, hiding the various words.   The last part is a “spinner” which indicates the current point value of the question.  Even if it wasn’t complete, there was enough to play the game.

I’m familiar with Password from the Game Show Network, but mostly as Password Plus because it’s on when I’m home for lunch.  We’ve also been watching the new version of Password with Regis Philbin that’s been airing recently.  Password first aired in 1961, with Alan Ludden as the host.   The original Password ran for several seasons on CBS and then ABC, and was revived on NBC as Password Plus and Super Password.    Ludden became ill during Password Plus’ run, and died in 1981.   His place was taken by Tom Kennedy through the end of Password Plus; Bert Convy was host of Super Password.   The new revival, Million Dollar Password, is hosted by Regis, closing in on 50 years of various incarnations of  Password since it first aired.

As we reassembled and started reviewing the rules, we all became aware that all those years of various versions and editions of the Password game have confused us.    The version we were playing was based on the very early TV version.    Each “giver” took turns offering one-word clues, and the “receiver” got one guess.   At each attempt, the point value dropped by one, and if it reached zero, the word was thrown out and nobody scored.  There is no timer in this home version of the game.    Unlike Password Plus, opposites are acceptable, but we were all stymied by the rule against using proper nouns as clues.

One commonality of all the Password TV show incarnations were the celebrity contestants: in nearly all cases, a competing contestant was paired with a non-competing celebrity.   In the home game everyone is competing to gain points, which meant that the scoring was made over-complicated by trying to account everybody’s successes and failures.   We eventually gave up on scoring according to the box rules, and just kept score by team — Deanna and myself against my mom and dad.

Gameplay, however, made you wonder how people could do it in front of a studio audience.   It is hard enough to come up with a good clue, let alone being on TV and risking money with each try.   Of course, when we were playing, one side inevitably felt the other was always getting the easier words.  Of course — and even though you saw it happen on TV and wondered how anyone could do something so dumb — one player slipped up and said the word they were trying to give clues for.  We even let the “proper noun” rule slip a couple times, because we weren’t sure how to proceed if such a mistake was made.

What did happen, though, was a lot of fun.   There aren’t a lot of boardgames that require teamwork the way Password does, and most tend to be variations on charades (of which Password qualifies as well).  If that proves anything, it is the time-worn success of the game model in use.   The alternating-guessing format of Password means, as seen on the show, that the competing pairs risk giving clues to their opponents in the process, which offers a greater degree of competition than simple charades.   Although the scoring process was complicated, and we had some trouble keeping to the rules, Password left plenty of room for “house rules,” which, frankly, is always a plus with family games.  While I haven’t always been the most receptive of my wife’s boardgame collection, I can completely see the appeal of a good, classic family game.  Password fits the bill, and I’m looking forward to the next opportunity to make a fool of myself with one-word clues.

Before the days of Electronic Talking Battleship, and before the fabled era of Crossfire and Domino Rally and those gluttonous, snap-jawed Hippos that I grew up with (but still around the same time that all of those pesky Mice that needed to be Trapped in the most circuitous fashion ever)… there was Mr. Know-It-All. His head was a lightbulb.

When I came across this 1967 Mr. Know-It-All board game on the mega-cheap, I was entranced. Not only do I usually feel like I was born in the wrong planet decade, but these older games have a certain resonance with me, even though I have no childhood experience with them at all. Call it a love of design evolution, a desire for simplicity, or call it reincarnation, but either way, these things come home with me. I’m enchanted by the idea of ‘used to’; how kids used to play, how doors used to be left unlocked, how life used to be a heck of a lot simpler.

The game consists of a set of multiple-choice question cards, all of which have SAT and IQ test-style questions on them. Below these questions are a set of three answers, each one positioned by a hole in the card itself. Once the player figures out their answer, they align their question card on a special cardboard grid that’s covered with a whole bunch of colors. Whichever ‘answer hole’ matches up with a green spot on the grid is the correct answer, and presumably, said player gets gloating rights, fame, and fortune. The set that I acquired is missing the instruction manual, so for all I know, the winner might officially get a swift groin-punch for becoming the dreaded and much-maligned ‘Know-It-All’… never a title that a sensible, social human being would covet.

So, the game mechanics are charming, but how do the questions measure up, 40 years later? While the game box states that it’s designed for ‘ages 7 thru 15′, I’d have a hard time finding an ‘average’ 7-year old who’d be able to complete a complex arithmetic sequence, understand fulcrums, estimate spatial relations and solve riddles about familial relations. This leads me to believe that either we’ve become a whole lot stupider, or just a whole lot lazier. Mr. Know-It-All has become Mr. Know-It-All-If-It-Relates-To-Hannah-Montana (Or High-School-Musical). And yes, you can find quiz games relating to those two subjects in today’s toy aisles, but nothing even close to the original brain-squeeze of Mr. Know-It-All.

Is this because thinking isn’t really regarded as ‘fun’ anymore? As someone who grew up with copies of GAMES Magazine lying around the house, I embraced the sport of thinking far more easily than I grasped superbasket or sportsball games. Of course, this was well before I realized that I’d make more money running around hitting things than by thinking about them – a decision that still haunts me today. Still, I can’t help but think that if my Freshman Year bullies had grown up with a copy of Mr. Know-It-All in the house, I’d have had a few less pieces of fruit ever-so-athletically hurled at my head.

The game itself was prepared by Robert M. Goldenson, a ‘known psychologist’, and ‘T.V. Personality’, back from the days when they still used dots in the word ‘TV’ like it was an abbreviation or something. He later went on to write a million dictionaries about sex, so he was clearly diversifying his output to all ends of the psychological spectrum. Goldenson is quoted as saying that, “Play is the way the child learns
what no one can teach him”, and as a teacher, I should have known to disguise my lessons as games. It’s all so clear now.

Here’s my call to see a resurgence of ’smart’ games like Mr. Know-It-All. And not just ones that are marketed to ‘gifted’ kids via catalogue and specialty shop – I want to see them right alongside those Harry Potter DVD trivia games. If your kid can recite every spell that Hermione ever cast, surely they can figure out a set of tangrams. Seriously.

(And the answers are all B, for those of you keeping track.)