Let’s Take a Look at the Most Popular ‘70s Board Games—How Many Do You Remember?
1970s Board Games
Let’s Take a Look at the Most Popular ‘70s Board Games—How Many Do You Remember?
Boom Again is a new pop culture game that tests your trivia knowledge about the music, movies, fun and fads of the Baby Boom era—from the 1950s through the ‘70s. Here, we take a look at the most popular 1970s board games. Some of them disappeared along with leisure suits, disco balls and 8-track tapes. Others have stood the test of time. Let’s see how many you know.
Mystery Date
Open the door to your…Mystery Date. Long before online dating, girls could try their luck finding a blind date with a roll of the die. The game came with a door in center of the board that you would open to reveal your date. Would it be the dreamboat in the tux? Or the “dud?”
Boggle
With Boggle, you shook out dice marked with letters onto a grid. Then all players had three minutes to find as many words as possible hidden in the grid.
At the end of each round, players shared their lists, and you earned points only for the words you alone discovered. The longer the words, the more points you got.
Boggle is often compared to another word game, Scrabble. As word games go, however, Boggle moves faster and is more action-packed.
Perfection
Let’s see if you can sing along with the Perfection game’s jingle. “Put the pieces into the slot. Make the right selection. It’s perfection!”
Players took turns trying to be the quickest to fit all 25 shapes into their matching holes in the gameboard. Perfection was one of many 1970s board games that mixed game play with a bit of fun mechanics—in this case, when the timer ran out, the board would pop out all the pieces.
Simon
Introduced in 1978, Simon was an electronic tabletop game—or as kids might later view it, an oversized Gameboy that only did one thing. The game consisted of a round board with four light-up panels in red, blue, green and yellow. Players would have to memorize a series of tones and lights, then repeat them in order. The patterns would get trickier as the game progressed.
Fun fact: Simon actually made its sparkling debut at the ultra-trendy Studio 54 nightclub in New York City. It became an instant hit—even with its somewhat high price tag (for the times) of $25, or more than $90 in today’s dollars.
Masterpiece
In the game Masterpiece, players bid on famous works of art, which could be worth a million dollars, or worthless forgeries.
Just as Looney Tunes introduced kids to classical music (including the famous “What’s Opera, Doc” episode that parodied 19th-century classical composer Wagner’s operas), many ‘70s kids got their first glimpse of classic paintings through this game.
Masterpiece featured 24 “paintings,” including Ven Gogh’s Sunflowers, as well as famous paintings from Cezanne, Da Vinci, Renoir, Monet and more.
While these masterpieces may still be hanging proudly in national museums, Masterpiece the game is no longer in print.
Next up is one of those 1970s board games that’s a variation on what people have been playing literally for centuries…
Connect Four
Released in 1974, Connect Four is essentially just Tic Tac Toe, only played with checkers instead with paper and pencil.
Fourteen years later, a computer programmer announced he’d solved the game. He claimed that the first player in any game can always win if they place their first piece in the board’s middle slot and play perfectly throughout the rest of the game.
But really, what is “playing perfectly?”
Pay Day
Pay Day actually outsold the board game Monopoly during its first year on the market. Players get through a calendar month, paying off bills and other expenses with their “pay day” wages. Hats off to Parker Brothers for somehow making tasks most people dread actually seem fun (well, for at least the length of the game).
As is often the case in life, whoever has the most money at the end wins.
Guess Who?
Guess Who? is a two-player guessing game released in 1979 and is still in stores today. Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon images of 24 people and their first names, then draws a card from a deck that will have one of those characters on it.
The goal is to guess the other player’s character by asking questions one-by-one by process of elimination. “Does your person wear a hat?” “Is your person a woman?” “Does your person wear glasses?”
Special editions which have different faces have been released, including a Disney version where questions might be more like, “Is your person a princess?” or “Is your person, in fact, not a person but an elephant with unusually large ears whose name rhymes with Jumbo?”
What other 1970s board games were your favorites?
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