Frank Branham: Milton Bradley, why hast thou forsaken me and Caveman

Did anyone happen to look at the boardgame shelves at the large toy retailers this season. Toys R Us and Walmart both lost some shelf space for board games, perhaps as much as 30%.

We're entering a bit of a shift in the types of games available as well. It seems now that games must come with DVDs, in a metal tin, and be the deluxe edition. Plastic bits are few in number, but are hand painted movers for a hybrid trivia / roll and move. For a few years there, we were having a resurgence in the type of games I think of as Milton Bradley games. Mostly this stems from my childhood, when the MB logo was always printed on oversized boxes containing zillions of bright plastic bits, nifty military themes, stuff blowing up, custom dice, and moderately complex games.

Hasbro and Mattel were definitely making games in this vein, with the Hasbro iteration of Avalon Hill making even more complex games than the norm, alongside the Mission Command series, Heroscape, several themed Risks, the UK D&D Adventure game, Epic Duels, Jurassic Park III, Buffy.

This year, we got the last dying gasp of Heroscape. (Swarm of the Marro is a really nice dying gasp, but when your $40 game is being sold for $7 the week before Christmas at Amazon, it isn't healthy.) We also got a very nice Star Wars Risk. And then....

I could find only one other game in that old style, it was a Ben 10 game, and it was by Pressman, so I lost interest quickly. (Richard Borg has done occasional work for Pressman, including the glorious Mutant Chronicles. I've not seen a decent big box game by them in awhile.)

The big boxes and plastic are now aimed at oversized toy games for a younger crowd. I'm guessing that more and more preteen boys are being lost to videogames.

I really miss that kind of game that used to fit in that void between Euros, oversized and complex AT games, and children's games. They seemed to dry up almost at once, as if someone had sent out a memo to all of the game companies saying, "Frank, we hate you."

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The folks who made Caveman apparently didn't get the memo. This is a 20 year old game, and you can practically hear the creaking as you open the rulebook.

You can almost check off a list pulled together from a survey of old MB games:

Plastic dinosaurs: Check
30-60 minute length: Check
Custom dice with symbols: Check
Oversize box: A little large for a Euro. Small by MB standards. Half a check.
Event cards with extra special action text: Check
Slightly wacky shifts in fortune from said cards and dice: Check
Fairly simple rules: Check

With a bit more money, and a larger print run, this would be an MB game. Then you look at some of the details:

1. Multiple victory conditions.
2. An end of game timer to make sure that games end.
3. Rules summary card
4. Card driven movement

These are more modern bits that you never saw in the older MB games. Otherwise I can see bits of Waddington's Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs, and I could swear that the basic card-driven system is pulled from Pangea: The Evolution Game. (Except that no one else has really ever played that nifty UK educational game, which is surprisingly progressive for its time. )

So of course, I like Caveman. Now if we could get more like that.

© 2007 Frank Branham

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I have to wonder if the decrease in board games at the general stores are due, in part, to the rise in board games at places like Barnes & Noble.  Last year I could easily find Ticket To Ride and other Days of Wonder stuff at local Toys R Us, for example, this year it’s no where to be found on their shelves!  But the DOW stuff is in my local Barnes and Noble, along with a bunch of Mayfair stuff too. Posted by Diane Close on Dec 21, 2007 at 02:25 PM | #

So Caveman’s a keeper, eh?  It caught my eye last week, but I knew nothing about it… Posted by Jon Theys on Dec 21, 2007 at 10:59 PM | #

Ayep. Caveman kind of has that 1 hour Civ thing going for it. You move people, fight over resources, and gain cultural improvements. And get eaten by dinosaurs. It isn’t deep, but it isn’t trivial. Posted by Frank Branham on Dec 22, 2007 at 12:00 AM | #

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