Mattel Baseball Handheld Game

Mattel Baseball Handheld Game was released in 1979. It featured...

• 1- or 2-player option
• a score key that gave inning, outs, balls, strikes and score;
• computer-controlled defense;
• 2 play speeds;
• unique sounds for runs scored, outs, base hits, strikes and game end.

Twister

Twister was released in 1966 and became an overnight success when Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on television's Tonight Show on May 3, 1966.


Twister is played on a large plastic mat that is spread on the floor or ground. The mat is like a board game. It has four rows of large colored circles on it with a different color in each row: red, yellow, blue, and green. A spinner is attached to a square board and serves as a die for the game. The spinner is divided into four labeled sections: right foot, left foot, right hand, and left hand. Each of those four sections is divided into the four colors (red, yellow, blue, and green). After spinning, the combination is called (example: right hand yellow) and players must move their matching hand or foot to a dot of the correct color. A person is eliminated when they fall or when their elbow or knee touches the mat. There is no limit to how many can play at once, but more than four is a tight fit.
 
Here's an 80's commercial for Twister...
 

Tri-Ominos

Tri-Ominos was a game we often played when I was a kid. It was a variant of dominoes using triangular tiles. Each triomino was in the shape of a triangle, each point of the triangle had a number (most often from 0-5), and each triomino had a unique combination of numbers.

Valid play of a triomino was similar to that of a domino in that the sides contacting each other must have matching numbers; the main difference was that two numbers must match instead of just one, and the number in each corner must match the corner it faces; a side with a 1 and a 2 may have the two numbers on opposite corners from the side the player was attempting to match. Points were scored based on the numbers on the tile played and when special placements were made.

Yahtzee

Yahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley (now owned by Hasbro), which was first marketed by game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe in 1956.

The object of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. The dice can be rolled up to three times in a turn to try to make one of the thirteen possible scoring combinations. A game of Yahtzee consists of thirteen rounds during which the player chooses which scoring combination is to be used in that round. Once a combination has been used in the game, it cannot be used again.

The scoring combinations have varying point values, some of which are fixed values and others of which have the cumulative value of the dice. A Yahtzee is five-of-a-kind and holds the game's highest point value of 50.

Trivial Pursuit

Trivial Pursuit's popularity peaked in 1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold. The rights to the game were licensed to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) in 1988.

The object of the game is to move around the board by correctly answering trivia questions. Questions are split into six categories, with each one having its own color to identify it; in the classic version of Trivial Pursuit, the Genus edition (pictured above), these are Geography (blue), Entertainment (pink), History (yellow), Arts & Literature (brown), Science & Nature (green), and Sports & Leisure (orange). The game includes a board, playing pieces, question cards and a box and small plastic wedges to fit into the playing pieces.

Playing pieces used in Trivial Pursuit are round and divided into six sections. A small, plastic wedge can be placed into each of these sections to signify when a question from a certain category has been correctly answered.

Jenga

Jenga is a game of physical and mental skill created by Leslie Scott in the mid 1980's, and currently marketed by Parker Brothers, a division of Hasbro. In Jenga, players take turns to remove a block from a tower and balance it on top, creating a taller and increasingly unstable structure as the game progresses.

The word jenga is the imperative form of kujenga, the Swahili verb "to build".

Pictionary

Pictionary is a guessing word game first published in 1985. The game is played with teams of players trying to identify specific words from their teammates' drawings.

There are five types of squares on the board, and each Pictionary card has a list of five words printed on it. Players must draw the word which corresponds to the square on the board on which the team's marker is:

P - Person/Place/Animal
O - Object
A - Action
D - Difficult (words which are difficult to represent in a drawing)
AP - All Play

Stop Thief Game

Stop Thief is a fantastic Electronic Cops and Robbers Game made by Parker Brothers in 1979.

"A crime is being committed... but where?"

This game of deduction allows players to act as detectives racing to catch a hidden thief. The location of the thief is only known to the Electronic Crime Scanner initially, but is revealed through a series of audio clues that are revealed each turn. Clues include the sounds that the thief makes while walking, opening doors, breaking windows, running down the street, riding the subway, and committing crimes.

Rack-O Game

Rack 'Em, Stack 'Em & Score!

How will you stack up? Take 10 cards at random & pop 'em in your rack. Now see if you can be the first player to get all of your cards in sequential order from lowest to highest. Rack up the highest score and you win!

Here's a 60's commercial for Rack-O as well as another game called Easy Money!

Raggedy Ann Board Game

Here is a game I had when I was a kid... Raggedy Ann Board Game. It was made by Milton Bradley in 1974. The object of the game was to be the first to complete the Raggedy Ann puzzle.

Mad Libs

Mad Libs was a phrasal template word game where one player prompted another for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story; these word substitutions had a humorous effect when the resulting story was then read aloud. It was invented in 1953 by Leonard Stern and Roger Price, who published the first Mad Libs book themselves in 1958.

For example, a Mad Lib might initially look like this:
"One day, (name of person) went to (place) and (past-tense verb) a (noun)."

After completing the Mad Lib, it might read:
"One day, John Doe went to Russia and ate a house."

UNO Wild Tiles

UNO Wild Tiles was made by International Games in 1986. It was an entirely new UNO experience, with the fun and excitement of UNO and the strategy of a board game. The object was to be the first player to get rid of all of your UNO wild tiles in your rack.

Headache Game

Headache is a board game similar to Trouble in which the object is to land on top of all your opponent's pieces (known as "cones"). The game is distinct from Trouble in that there is no finish the player must reach. Play moves in circles, until only one player has cones remaining on the board, being declared the winner; i.e., it is a running-fight game. All players are welcome to occupy any space throughout the game, provided die roll allows, and there are eight spaces that serve as "safe" spots, where a cone resting on this space cannot be captured. Captured pieces are not sent back to start, but are permanently lost.

Like Trouble, Headache has its dice in a Pop-o-matic bubble in the center of the board. The bubble is pressed to roll the dice. But unlike trouble, which has a single die in the bubble, Headache has two dice. One die is a regular die featuring the numbers one thru six. The other is blank on five sides, and has a red dot on the sixth side. The red dot, if rolled allows for an extra turn.

Headache was first introduced in 1975 by the Kohner Brothers. It is currently manufactured by Milton Bradley.

Concentration Game

Concentration was made by Milton Bradley in 1959. This game is played just like the game on TV. Each player tries to uncover pairs of valuable prizes or gift cards which are removed from the board. As the cards are taken away, parts of a hidden word puzzle appear. There is a roll of 60 different puzzles in the roll-o-matic puzzle changer.

Sorry! Board Game

The earliest variation of today's Sorry! can be traced back to England, shortly before its arrival in the United States. Sorry! was adopted by Parker Brothers in 1934, and has remained in their possession since. It is an American hallmark board game, being played by generations of Americans, as well as throughout the world.

The objective is to be the first player to get all four pawns from the start square to the home square.

Here is a 1982 commercial for Parker Brothers Games, featuring Sorry!

Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 was a video game console released in October 1977. It was typically bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a cartridge game—initially, Combat, and subsequently, Pac-Man.

My favorite games were River Raid, Pitfall Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.

1982 Atari Commercial


1983 Atari Commercial

Uno Card Game

Uno is a card game played with a specially printed deck -- it consists of cards of 4 colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. The ranks in each color are 0-9. There are 3 "action" cards in each color, labeled "skip", "draw two", and "reverse". There are also special black action cards, "wild" and "wild draw four". Be the first player or team to score 500 points. Points are scored by being the first to rid yourself of all the cards in your hand before your opponents.

The game was originally developed in 1971 by Merle Robbins. It is now a Mattel product.

Perfection Game

Perfection was released by the Milton Bradley company in the 70s. The object is to put all the pieces into matching holes on the board (pushed down) before a time limit runs out. When time runs out, the board springs up, causing all or at least many of the pieces to fly out. In the most common version, there are 25 pieces to be placed within 60 seconds.

Touché

Touché was made by Gabriel in 1977. It was a game played on a sturdy plastic grid. Each player has 6 pawns. Each clear plastic pawn (cylindrical or cuboid) has a magnetic chip inside. Each chip is white on one side and red on the other. Hidden beneath the board is a magnetic force. The force can flip the disc inside a pawn to the opponent's color, allow it to remain the same, or flip a color from the opponent's to your color. The goal: be the 1st player to line up 4 consecutive pawns of your color in a row (either horizontal, vertical, diagonal).

Old Maid Card Game

I loved playing Old Maid when I was a kid. We had these jumbo cards that had funny characters with funny names on the cards. Their large size made them especially easy to hold for little kids' hands. They were released in 1968.