BTW, here’s my early gaming cred: one of my older brothers, apparently starved for someone to play games with while home from college one summer, taught his 7-year-old kid brother (me) how to play ALL of the games in the Milton Bradley Command Decision series. Dogfight, Broadsides, Hit The Beach, Skirmish, and Battle-Cry. They were in the large family games closet, and were originals from the early 1960s in mint condition, with the very new at the time Skirmish standing out for its gleamingness. (Sadly, I think mom sold them at a garage sale circa 1980 or so.)
Thinking back, those games were kind of the ur-version of what modern gaming would become, what with the detailed miniatures (some of which required assembly), upgraded components and more (slightly) more complex rules systems.Also, the artwork/graphics were kind of great.
I also cut my gaming teeth on Battle-Cry, Broadside and Dogfight. We knew that Hit the Beach existed but never found a copy locally. By the time Skirmish came out we were playing AH games.
Since this thread has turned into “hey, here are the things I played before I knew any better!” – understandable, since we’re having to draw from a time before the invention of good boardgame design – this is one of the earliest boardgames I remember actually playing:
It had little plastic aircraft carriers and airplanes. The planes were on little stands so you could slot them onto the aircraft carrier, and then when they took off, you put a token in the base of the bracket to represent their loadout. Look how cool it was:
It’s got to be a terrible actual design. It’s one of my earliest boardgames, and probably the only one I was able to actually play, but only because I cajoled my little sister into playing with me.
That reminds me of one of my early experiences. My crazy cousin who was about 10-12 years older than me had a ton of games that I was occasionally allowed to play. One was a naval game. It wasn’t a serious wargame, but it played like a 3D version of Battleship.
Your submarine (the little ship at the top and bottom) fired little disks that, if aimed well (or properly machine-gunned everywhere), would slide into slots at the bottom of the bigger ships and cause their springloaded superstructures and gun turrets to pop out of the top.
That reminds me that I remember owning a game where you fired little ballista and catapults at castle walls and soldiers and it would collapse when hit well, and a ‘sequel’ featuring pirate ship battles.
A buddy and I were on a ski trip and the highways got shut down due to freezing rain. We were stuck in Banff all day. Ended up buying Crossbow and Catapults and it turns out it’s a great drinking game with some homemade rules.
Torpedo Run is definitely in the toy-game genre with Crossbows and Catapults! I think C&C is a genius game. I never encountered your pirate version of it, @Dissensus, but I did have a game called Immortals of Change–man, I thought that name was epic!–that was C&C meets Transformers. (The pieces were designed to go together to make robotic figures.)
I coudln’t find it for a while, but it turns out it is not part of the Crossbows and Catapults series, but rather a different series called Weapons and Warriors, which looks to have been an early '90s knockoff (or perhaps an “obsoletion” of it in Mr. Chick’s terms) of Crossbows and Catapults. It also had a castle version, so those are most likely what I played.
That’s reductive. Card games might be a subset of board games, but they still fit the category. and some of my most played board games are card games. That last playlist link from SUSD is a list of older / classic card games which have stood the test of time according to them.
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