Matt Carlson: Games of Christmas Past

My mother could fry a mean Sunfish.  As a child, I would catch sunnies off the dock in our backyard.  When we caught enough large ones, my dad would clean them while I looked on, and then my mother would batter and deep fry them.  They were great.  I hadn’t thought about them in many years, until one day in Boston I ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant serving Spicy Salty Dry-Fry Squid.  They were delicious.  They didn’t taste like the fish I ate as a child, a person’s mind can be tricky and subtly glorify the past.  However, these squid actually tasted as good as my memory of the fried fish of my childhood.  Can any of my childhood games stand a similar test of time?  Or are there any new children’s games around that can hold up to a similar comparison?

My father always fondly recalled eating fried Spam as a child while my wife likes to reminisce about Spagetti-Os.  However, both were in for a rude awakening when they got around to giving their past favorites a fresh look with an adult palate.  Games can sometimes age the same way.  I remember gladly playing the old Avalon Hill bookshelf game, Stellar Conquest, which is essentially a conquer the galaxy computer game without the benefit of a computer.  All that paperwork and documentation used to play the game can now be done far more easily on a computer.  Playing the game now, I would just yearn for a computer to simplify it for me.

One game that has aged well is Gusher, a 1940s boardgame based around drilling for oil.  I’ve always been a boardgame fan, and when boardgames came up over holiday family gatherings, my father would invariably bring up this game of his past, Gusher, that he would play with the neighbor kids.  After hearing the story enough times, I hit upon the bright idea of finding a copy of the game.  After a few surreptitious interviews with my dad with follow-up searches of the BoardgameGeek database, I figured out the game that I was looking for was, in fact, Gusher.  One summer a few years back I went on an Ebay search and came up with a few hits for the game.  After a couple of attempts, I was able to get a hold of a pretty decent copy of the game.  It was a bit above my normal Christmastime budget, but it has proven to be worth it.  Now my father can share one of his favorite childhood memories with his grandchildren.  It has been several years since I gave him the game, but it still gets taken out from time to time.  It is kept separate from the other games, not from a lack of interest but more a sign of the respect for the game – it is only to be played with an adult present due to the many moving parts.

That’s my Christmas boardgame story for this year.  As I write this, my nephews are busy in a game of Viva Topo! and I feel strangely drawn to go show them how to beat that dreaded cat.  Before I go, does anyone else have favorite childhood boardgame memories they wish to share?

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