Board games used to be a major pastime of mine. Being an only child, and possessing a lexicon not particularly bespoke for a little tyke, I often had to play with my mother or Mervyn, the bunny rabbit (which usually means that I won, of course). But now that I look back on them, I realize that they were, for a while at least, part of the stylistic and cultural vanguard, little designs for an engineered contemporary middle class.
The design king amongst board games has to be the 1971-era edition of Careers. With a name like that, you can only imagine that it was a hit amongst guidance counselors. But it’s the clean Helvetica that attracts my eye these days.
The board game’s cover isn’t quite as bold with its typographical license, but there’s a lot of modernism to be felt in the deliberate choice to not capitalize the first ‘c’ in Careers. Caught with mink, lose 1/2 your fame? Common sense. Let boss win at golf? Now that’s the dated adage I was looking for — who plays golf with their boss any more?
The ungame is derided today, although to be fair it is still in print. I give it some pomo credit for having such a fantastically existential name — it “tells it like it is” and lets you know, right up front, that it ISN’T a game! It is a tool for hapless middle class parents to somehow discuss morality and contemporary issues with their children. And it even came in religious editions:
If you squint you can see such exciting un-locations as the “Favor Factory” and the “Compliment Clubhouse”. An entire CLUBHOUSE devoted to compliments? This game would be fantastic to play while drunk, the answers would be truer to life than Dr. James Dobson could ever have hoped.
Side note: Austin, Texas’ NBC affiliate co-opted the “tell it like it is” phrase, right down to using the exact same font, from this game, sometime in the late 1980’s for their ad campaigns.
Another favorite game of mine was “Bargain Hunter” — it was actually billed as a fun antidote to inflation, the non-corporeal scapegoat of early 1980’s malaise. It was also the first board game to feature credit cards!
Design-wise, Bargain Hunter is only middlebrow, but I do appreciate how slavish it was to the style of TV game shows of the time. It looks like it could be “Let’s Make A Deal”, which it clearly owes a bit of its substance to.
Payday was the ultimate board game product of the 1970’s — the first signs of Keynesian distress appeared in the recreational amusements of Americana. To wit, it was a pretty ingenious idea to use a calendar and paycheck to teach children that their life would be consigned to humdrum doom.
While the Peter Max-esque drawings are merely okay and a bit ‘bandwagon’ in terms of design, the font I love to hate to love makes an appearance! Take a look at day 29 — Lottery Draw! That, my friends is the inimitable Bookman Swash. Yes, this Bookman Swash:
“Sentence Cube Game” was another one I used to mostly play with myself (although I do remember conning a few friends into thinking it was the REAL SCRABBLE). This game looks like what Meathead probably played with Gloria while Archie was away at work. “Ages 12 and up — quaaludes not included.”
I am a nostalgic, I admit it. I don’t really own any new board games. This was my last acquisition:
Anyone want to play? I get to be Jessica Fletcher.