5 Retro Games I am LOVING playing with my children!

Some of my fondest memories of my childhood are of playing board games with my family and friends. Fast forward more years than I care to admit and now I am a parent myself, I am chuffed to bits that some of my old favourites are still around and in a relatively unchanged format! For her fourth birthday last week, games were a major feature in the gifts that she received.

Here are my top 5 childhood games that I am loving being able to introduce to Erin – some we are playing already whilst others are on the to do list, but rest assured, every single one will be making a re-appearance!

Guess Who

I would happily play Guess Who for hours as a little girl. I loved the click clack sound the people made as you eliminated them from the ‘list of potentials’. I loved the buzz when you picked a characteristic that enabled you to take out loads of characters in one fowl swoop. I loved getting the answer right whilst my opponent had loads of cards left standing on their board. You may have guessed, I was also a tad on the competitive side!! 🙂

Earlier this week I introduced Erin to a non branded version of the same game ‘Who Am I?’ and she loved it, albeit taking a few attempts to get her head around the concept. The first few games she started to describe her card before we had even started (bless her!!) and struggled to differentiate between the final few people, but she has managed to win more often than not, and seemed very chuffed with herself when she gets it right! 🙂 What I also love about this game is the underlying message of individual differences, with characters of different races, genders and ages in the mix, including the normally somewhat under-represented gingers! 🙂

Connect 4 /  4-in-a-row

Back in the 80s, I was a huge fan of Connect 4, battling against my sister to see who could get four pieces in a row first. I was always yellow, and I nearly always lost, with most of the time the game resulting in me having a bit of a tantrum or insisting on making the winner the best of five. We had a travel version with a tray for car journeys, which inevitably led to my poor mother scrambling into the back seat and hunting high and low for a missing (yellow!) piece.

This week, I have introduced Erin to Jumbo 4 Connect from Big Game Hunters – a giant garden version of the game I know and love (you can find this and other Giant Connect Four games here. This super sized garden game is the perfect height for Erin to get involved, easy to slot together and comes with its own little bag for packing away all the red and yellow discs to ensure they don’t get lost. Unlike the travel version however these giant pieces are somewhat easier to find! 🙂

At four, Erin is perhaps a little young to really grasp the logic behind the game, although the message is slowly starting to sink in! The game went down a treat at her fourth birthday party this week, with friends and family gathering round to play together in teams. That said, Erin is also quite content making pretty patterns with the discs, and laughs hysterically when she pulls out the wooden base plate causing them to all come tumbling to the floor.

The Game Of Life

An absolute favourite of mine when I hit junior school, I was always gutted if I didn’t secure a well paid job and was beyond delighted if I managed to land on the Twins space, shrieking with delight at the prospect of adding two little pink pegs to the back of my car. Ironic, as the prospect of being dealt the hand of twins as an adult was enough to have me break out in a cold sweat and something I was incredibly nervous of when I went for my first scans!

By far the best part of this game was the set up of all the 3D track including universities and buildings, and the click click click noise of the wheel which would occasionally fly off with a mind of its own when I got a little over zealous with my spinning!

Monopoly

I started playing Junior Monopoly when I was about 7, and since then have played almost every version of the game going- from the limited edition Disney Monopoly set, through to the more recent chip and pin, the latter of which was a total crock – where’s the joy in Monopoly when you can’t physically count out the money??

It’s fair to say that no one EVER really knows the correct rules regarding the FREE PARKING space, and that this game has lead to more arguments than it has family bonding, however I cannot wait to set this up with Erin when she is a little older. Knowing Erin, she is more likely to think it has something to do with McDonalds than a game of luck and skill!

Scrabble

A retro board game list wouldn’t be complete without Scrabble – probably the most simple yet unstraightforward game in the world. As I got older, me and my Mum would play Scrabble on a Friday night after school, whilst my Dad annoyingly pointed out every word that didn’t make the cut in his Oxford Dictionary. Try as I might, I rarely managed to reach those elusive triple score squares, and would spend most of the game time searching for somewhere I could simply place an S for an easy points plural! 🙂

Board games these days have taken a somewhat unexpected turn, with Erin asking for games involving picking up dog poo and pulling bogies out of a mans nose until his eyes pop out. Nice. As appealing as they may sound, sometimes you cannot beat an old classic.

What games did you play as a child that you will be introducing to your children?

Are there any that you would NOT want to see make a re-appearance?

*This is a collaborative post*