5 Games From Bruce’s Childhood That Belong In Hell

Maybe I am being a bit harsh, perhaps I should call this narrative "5 games from my childhood that made MY life a living hell". Let me give you a little background about me, I am the youngest of four kids. I do not like to lose and everybody in my family was given a gift of game playing talent, everyone but me.

Anytime the suggestion of "Let's play a game" was made I did my best to shy away from the field of competition. I would then be shamed into playing and then beaten unmercifully until the game board would some how magically defy the power of gravity and fly into the air while I ran to hide in my room.  I don't like to play games. Correction, I don't like to lose ...anything.

Here are my least favorite games as a kid I hated to lose and hated to play.

Battleship- This had all the excitement of playing BINGO against  yourself. In fact it almost was playing BINGO against yourself. The idea was to deduce where your opponent hid their boats on a plastic ocean that was peppered with holes to match a grid system printed on the side of the plastic case.

This game had all the excitement of Hee Haw reruns with the sound down. You knew there was something going on but you weren't quite sure what it was and in the end it was boring. I believe this game was the reason so many people of my generation opted for the Air Force or the Army instead of the Navy. Thank God the NAVY had the Village People helping them out during this tenuous time.

Mousetrap- This is a game that when translated into the adult world is about as much fun as assembling furniture from IKEA (NSFK). Part of the game itself is to assemble the non working mousetrap.

The mousetrap is constructed during the course of play and is a non functioning example of a foreign made Rube Goldberg device. The shoddy plastic  pieces constructed by the unsteady hands of children does add some suspense to the ending of the game.

I always found that it was never the first or second mouse to be captured by this nonsensical contraption it was always the third. That is because that by the third time a mouse had landed on the spring the trap square a grown up had meandered by and correctly installed all the pieces into the game board insuring that trap would actually work.

Risk - Risk? Really? This would be more appropriately titled "choking hazard". I realize for you youngsters many of these games are now available in electronic and online form. In my day Risk was a game played with a board, some dice and some tiny colored wooden blocks that hurt like hell when you stepped on them with bare feet.

From what I recall about my attempts to play this game of conquering nations, continents and the desire not to slip into a coma you used a pair of dice and some cards. Let's say you rolled the dice and got a seven, now you own Bermuda. Dang that was fun, let's do it again until we pass out on this map of the world as we know it.

Ouija Board - I am not sure if this was really a game or just my sister's way of inviting the Devil into our home. Allegedly the participants ask the super secret spirit of the Ouija Board a question and then those who wanted to know the answer gently laid their hands on the Ouija, I guess that's what you called the  plastic thing.

The plastic thing would then be guided by the spirit world over a series of letters or numbers spelling out the answer to the desired question. I played Ouija Board one time. I asked the spirits what would be the name of my true love. The board told me the answer when it spelled out JkWzlerM8. She must be from Russia or something and I still haven't met her yet.

Mystery Date - This was before Chris Hansen made the pursuit of young girls a thing on "To Catch A Predator". There was a game called Mystery Date. I remember it had a catchy commercial and showed what appeared to be semi-attractive prepubescent girls dreaming of  a special boy who would come knock on their door for their mystery date.

I think the object of the game was to teach women to have really high expectations of men. This game suggested that all men would be tall, athletic, handsome and well groomed and arrive for a night on the town with flowers and candy.  This was the message of Mystery Date, the exact opposite of reality.

There should have been short fat guys like me on the other side of that plastic door. This would have taught our ladies a valuable lesson, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if what you see is not beautiful there is always booze to make it so.

My Honorable Mention:

Perfection - This was a neat combination of an IQ shape test and junior bomb disposal kit. The plastic shapes fit into the plastic holes in only one way. The object was to get all of the millions, or so it seemed, shapes into the holes that never seemed to accept the piece the proper way within the allotted time.

I think the timer said each contestant had one full minute to execute the shape insertion before the entire playing surface would explode like a radical extremist in a Middle Eastern market.  What fun!

In less than one minute you could confirm to your family and friends that you weren't that smart and you had issues with incontinence when the darn thing exploded.

There are my 5  games, plus one, that I still  hate to this day from my childhood. You may have loved these games, you may have played these games for hours on end, you may have a mutant alien living in  your brain who is telling the voices in your head to do awful things.  What games from your childhood did you really enjoy playing and what games should be directed to the dumpster of forgotten evil? I would love for you to share your thoughts with me. Then maybe we could sit down for a good ol fashioned game of paper football.