Think you'll have fun playing this game? Dream on!

Well, that's half an hour of our lives we won't get back. Last night me and the mister had a bout of ennui, and decided to play this -

We'd bought it from a charity shop in Wales a couple of months ago, but stuff kept getting in the way and we never got round to playing it. Eventually, after putting everything we own into alphabetical order, watching every episode of The Foster And Allen Show ever made, and sterilising all our cutlery, we had to face the sad truth – there was nothing else to do but play this game.

We settled down with the various bits and pieces, safe in the smug knowledge that at least we weren't out vandalizing bus stops. We clung to that thought as the game went on, because we needed to feel something good about playing this game.

According to Board Game Geek, “Dream On is an exciting new board game that answers the age old question 'What do my dreams really mean?' The game provides over 1000 dream interpretations derived from the works of the world's most prominent dream analysts."

Here is the bored, I mean the board -

Even the board looks like it's going to sleep.

Also included are a load of interpretation cards, which we'll get to in a minute. Note that someone enjoyed playing this game so much that they went to the trouble of going out and photocopying a few million of these cards. This was presumably around the time of the game's launch in 1992, so the chances of them having a photocopier at home would have been slim. That means they would have had to go out, find a shop with a photocopier, and pay 10p a copy. This game does not deserve that.

Now then – the rules!

I think the general aim of the game is to be able to read people's minds. Let's see -

First – all the players select a piece and place it on the START square. We're all over this shit so far.

Now then. The person selected to be the 'dreamer' (in this case, the mister) selects a card and reads one dream aloud from the card.

This is the card he picked -

The dreamer reads the dream out, and the other players have to write what they think is a convincing interpretation of it.

This is what I wrote -

Then all the players apart from the dreamer vote on which they think is the correct/most likely interpretation.

Hang on, wait, what? How are we supposed to do that with only two players?

Then we spotted this -

Fuck. A whole four minutes wasted. Also, the adults thing is questionable. Never mind, we are nothing if not belligerent. So we decided to continue playing, albeit with slightly tweaked rules.

Are you asleep yet? If not, well done. I am.

Then the mister hit on a bright idea. The dreamer reads a dream out, then we both write down an interpretation of it, so together with the interpretation on the card there are three different interpretations. Then the dreamer reads out all three, and the other player has to choose the correct one.

Spot the flaw in that plan.

What is the point of me writing anything down on my card? I'm going to know that's not the correct answer. Nevertheless, we played with these rules for a while, and I kept choosing my own interpretation just to piss the mister off.

After roughly half an hour, here's where we were on the board -

By now we were so bored we were actively trying to lose, just so the game would stop.

After a while we even gave up on that and just started writing down dreams we'd had (real and imagined) and what we thought they might mean. Here are some of them -

Then we had to decide whether to carry on playing or to hit ourselves over the head with a sack of bricks. Luckily, it was time to go to bed before we could decide.

The end.

Like this post? Try these -

We play the Just Seventeen Kiss Chase board game!

Playing board games as an adult

Starting the new year correctly – by not knowing any 80s trivia

A belated happy new year to my readers – I've been taking a break, and for the last week or so I've been doing nothing but eating sandwiches and playing board games. It's been ace.

Anyway – here are my new year's resolutions, up to all of which have been broken already -

1 Get dressed occasionally, and not just waz around in my pyjamas.

2 Blog about crappy toys as soon as I buy them, rather than just leaving them to form some weird sacrificial pile that is growing daily.

3 Stop being a talentless, deluded hack.

I'll be honest – I might or might not do a podcast this year. Me and the mister are very keen on the idea, but whenever we have a day off together we just end up sprawled out on the sofa, watching increasingly bad movies and trying to get each other in a headlock. Also, the mister got a Nerf gun for Christmas which shoots foam bullets, so he might get arrested soon for annoying passers by. I didn't get him that. I got him this -

which instantly renders him cooler than anyone else in the world, ever.

Since this isn't LiveJournal, I can't just sit here talking about myself. Let me show you what we found in a charity shop last week -

I plan to write about this game as soon as we can figure out how to actually play it – it seems akin to deciphering the Rosetta Stone. Also, the questions are things like 'what is Bet Lynch's middle name?' so we might end up playing it for 72 hours straight without getting a question right.

A typical question card -

Please pray for us.

Who needs friends when you have Two Way TV on Challenge?

I'm not sure how many people will remember this, but gamehow obsessed Sky channel Challenge used to have a red button option. Pressing the red button took you to Two Way TV, home to a bunch of games. I'm not sure how many games there were, because I only remember two, but there were definitely two.

These games were brilliant, and I loved them to the point of wanting to marry them. Sadly, there isn't much info on the old Two Way TV service so I'm mostly writing this from my flea bitten memory. I also have a horrible feeling that you might have had to pay for these games, so I might have cost my parents billions of pounds as a child. Whoops.

Tactiles -

This was a pairs matching game with a twist. A bunch of aliens formed an impossibly cute little grid, like the one you see above. You made the aliens disappear by sorting them into pairs, but you were only allowed to match pairs that had a clear path between them. A clear path was defined as one that went round no more than two corners. So this was allowed -

but this wasn't -

You were given 20 minutes to complete the game, and as I usually did it in 5 or 6, I felt like a goddamn genius most of the time. That's probably what kept me playing for hours on end. Being good at something was such a rare occurrence for me that I had to grab it with both hands whenever it came along.

String 'em in -

Here we have a more challenging version of Boggle. You have 20 minutes to clear the grid of letters by making words. The catch was that you could only go straight up or down or straight across – none of this diagonal nonsense. You also got points for each word; if I remember correctly the scoring system was similar to Scrabble. Normally you'd be left with two or three annoying letters at the end, and no matter how hard you tried, you could never make X J W into a word.

String 'em in is now on Facebook, or at least it was, because I've played it on there. But poor Tactiles is nowhere to be seen, save for the odd mysterious screenshot on Google. Those of you who never played it, I feel for you. Those who did, consider yourselves honoured.

Playing board games as an adult

Walking through a toy shop with my boyfriend's sister a while ago, I spotted the Pop Up Pirate game -

Essentially, it was Buckaroo for children who liked to stab things. It was a favourite game of mine as a child, and I ran to purchase it while trying not to foam at the mouth. But then my companion pointed out that “you always stab the same hole to make the pirate jump out, you know.”

Deflated, I realised she must be right, and that the reason I'd been so amazed by it as a kid was that I'd obviously been an idiot child.

But after some painstaking research (googling), I learned that my sister-in-law had actually never learned to set the game up properly, resulting in the same outcome every time. It turns out she'd been the idiot child and not me. Thus I was vindicated.

But it got me thinking – what other pieces of cheap plastic 'family fun' had I goggled over as a child? And would they live up to my memories of them? I decided to find out, promptly going out and spending money I couldn't really afford, tracking down these lost relics of my younger years. Let me tell you – evenings at my house have been a non-stop rollercoaster of fun ever since. I'm almost certain my boyfriend doesn't miss things like sex and alcohol, and is perfectly happy to shuffle plastic discs around a piece of cardboard.

Ghost Castle

 

Object of the game – to move your player round a haunted cardboard castle and open the coffin on the roof, while avoiding traps, curses and falling skulls

Extremely scary as a child. Containing up to 80% peril in any given round, you played the game in constant fear of being decapitated by ghosts, or knocked down an endless staircase, again by a ghost. Or worst of all, being knocked unconscious by a flying skull, which was not a very nice thing to happen to you. Because I was such a wuss as a kid, I was convinced the game would somehow kill me in real life, and I could never really play it without having a nightlight/hot drink/exorcism afterwards. As an adult, the game failed to terrify me the way it once had – so much so that I began making up my own rules – if I can throw the plastic skull into my boyfriend's drink, I win. If I can roll the dice one more time without dying of boredom, I win. Best rule of all – since I paid for the game, I automatically win, and anyone who disagrees will be banished for all eternity to the Ghost Castle, which I now own.

Screwball Scramble

 

Object of the game – to navigate a metal ball around a series of mazes, see-saws and balance beams before the wind-up timer runs out

Only after hours and hours of practice could you master this game, and become master of your friends by association. I was never very good at this – my clumsy, chocolate smeared hands would inexpertly fumble at the various knobs, until the little metal ball flew out and ended up somewhere in France.

I should be able to conquer this game as an adult, right? After all, it's only a kids' game. Now I'm thirty I'll kick its ass, right? Wrong, but not for the reasons you might think. Upon removing Screwball Scramble from its box, my boyfriend immediately leapt on it, shrieking as if I'd just covered my boobs in chocolate spread. And he didn't go further than two inches away from it for the next six hours. By the time I was finally allowed a go, I'd become disenchanted by seeing him swearing, shouting at the ball, threatening to kill the ball, and finally crying in a heap on the floor.

Mousetrap

Object of the game – to trap your opponent's mouse under a mechanical mouse trap, and also to be able to assemble the bloody thing in the first place

Mousetrap was the game of my childhood – if you had Mousetrap, you could expect your social calendar to be full for at least the next two years. The reason it was so popular was because it was such a miraculous feat of engineering – something akin to being able to watch Willy Wonka's chocolate making machines in action – 30% physics, 70% magic.

My first mistake as an adult was to buy a second hand Mousetrap set – one that had obviously been chewed by babies/smashed with hammers by frustrated parents. As such, none of the bits really fit together correctly. Or maybe they never fit together properly in the first place, leading to said parents attacking it with a hammer. My second mistake was allowing my boyfriend to construct the mousetrap – as a science teacher, and also as a man, he soon reached a level of frustration never before seen by mankind. As a dutiful girlfriend, I went in search of a hammer, only to find that he'd tired of the whole thing, and now wished only to go drink beer. Even now he can't see a mouse without combusting with rage.

I guess nostalgia has a way of turning us into fools with rose tinted vision. People like to talk about the heady days when families would sit together on an evening and play a wholesome, non-threatening game. Those memories are about as real as the diet I'm currently claiming to be on. what families really used to do was sit round a table, snarling with rage and brandishing hammers and fists at a piece of cardboard.

My first day off in a bajillion years, plus three old machines I found

I know I haven't blogged properly for a few months - despite me telling you I wouldn't be on for a while, I still thought I'd be back to normal by now. But bear with me, I'm nearly done with my whirlwind of never even having time to read Puddle Lane books on the toilet. I am STILL sorting out my house move, but (please god baby jesus and all the cows in the stable) we will get the keys this week. Also, my new job requires me to do a lot of overtime, so recently I've been doing a million billion hours a week. For example, I've just done 47 hours in 4 days, and I am knackered most of the time. Anyway, I have lots of stuff to write about that I've picked up these last few months, and hopefully I'll get my shit together in the Autumn and finally do a podcast, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

Before I get onto the main topic of today's post, I want to mention that I'm compiling my own bucket list, although it's a bit shit at the moment. It doesn't contain cliched crap like 'swim with dolphins' and 'take salsa lessons', as I am not a fictional woman in an advert. This is what I have so far -


Buy something off Price Drop TV and get my name on the bottom of the screen

Get my Jerry Beads (this one is probably impossible, sadly)

Do a podcast (I don't mind if it's crap, which it will be)

Learn to sew properly and make myself a dress

Go to a waterpark (haven't been able to in recent years due to illness)

Complete WonderBoy in Monster World for the Megadrive

Go to the Edinburgh Festival


I'll add more as I think of them. Anyway, last week I had a rare couple of days off, so I went to Anglesey to see my dad. On  the way back, me and the mister stopped at Rhyl for the afternoon, which was very exciting for me since I'm a bit weird. I kept spotting old, knackered arcade games I hadn't seen since I was a child with a mullet - proper games that cost 20p, and where you can sometimes win tickets to spend on tat from the prize shop. Incidentally, we won 107 tickets which we spent on a lucky bag containing JLS stickers. I feel so blessed.

Shoot Away! Well, Shoot Away 2 to be exact. This was in every single arcade ever when I was a kid, always tucked away in some grubby, peeling corner. I never saw anyone playing it, except I must have done once because I know that it's a clay pigeon shooting game. Look how they've successfully captured the feeling of being an inbred English aristocrat in a muddy field on a Tuesday afternoon. I wish I'd had a go actually, but we were busy eating chips at the time.

Sonic Blast Man! This is a bit of a cheat since this machine is named 'Return of Sonic Blast Man', but it's my blog so there. I used to play this a lot as a teenager but I was always rubbish at it. The thing in the middle would stick up, and you had to punch it as hard as you could. I always used to get some brilliant failure messages such as "Your face has exploded, please insert coins".

Generic egg machine! These were fab when you were feeling a bit swish and had 20p burning a hole in your pocket. You pop a coin in, and the bird spins round before shitting out a prize for you. This machine is called 'Cheeky Chick', even though it goes on to say that the bird inside is a duck. I will let that one slide since I love these things so much. Joy of Joys, it still cost 20p a go - I'd fully expected to find a modified version that now cost a quid, so it was a nice surprise to find one little corner of the world that hadn't been completely tainted by greed.
As luck would have it, I had one 20p left in my purse, so I popped it in and the duck shit out a plastic egg for me. Inside the egg was a yellow ninja! We added this to the JLS stickers, the plastic key ring that said 'Winner', and the plush chilli with an angry face, and headed home feeling like kings.

5 creepy idents

Sorry for the gap in posts this last day or so - I've been out getting a new job and such, and am now writing this on the mister's clunky, unfamiliar laptop. It's only clunky because I'm too stupid to use any laptop but mine. Anyway, due to my inability to type more than three words without it looking like a monkey sat on the keyboard, today's post will be small. I would like to share five creepy as hell TV, video and game idents that scared the crap out of me as a child. I present to you - even more reasons why I am such a massive wuss.

1. BBC Video - 1990s

2. BBC Video - 1980s

3. Channel 4 - 1982

4. Sega - 1991

5. ITV Nightshift - 1992

The best car boot haul ever - prepare for a pile of awesome

LOOK AT THIS!

I'll just give you a minute to take it all it. Maybe you'll want to go build a shrine to the picture, I don't know.
I got all this stuff for under 15 quid. Again, I'll give you a minute to take that in. Apart from Screwball Scramble, which I'm pretty sure is a newer version, all this stuff is from the 80s or very early 90s. And that makes me very happy, because now I own it all.
Regular readers will immediately spot one or two things that are destined to get their own posts, but for now I'm just going to dive into this barrel of smashingness. Look upon it, and if you don't weep, at least do the Macarena or something.

Board Games

Screwball Scramble, Dingbats and Atmosfear 2. I know Screwball Scramble isn't technically a board game, but I plan to play it when I'm bored so it counts. 

I've never played Screwball Scramble before, but I look forward to losing at it for years to come. I always loved Dingbats, the lateral thinking game, as a child, but was always too young and stupid to appreciate it properly. Now I am no longer young, so everything works out. I've also never played any of the Atmosfear games, but now I own the first and second so I look forward to a night of beer and shitting myself over those videos with the mister.

Snoopy flask

Complete with cup and internal lid, but thankfully not containing any 20 year old Um Bongo. I was brave enough to take a sniff inside, and it still has that plasticky smell that lunch boxes and flasks are supposed to have. I am not stupid enough, however, to actually attempt to drink out of it. I value my life.

She Ra figure

I've wanted a She Ra for years, but have always felt too guilty to buy one for full price on Ebay. So imagine my joy when I found her in a box of junk for 50p! Admittedly, she looks like she's had a wild night out followed by sex in a hedge, but I plan to straighten her hair out and give her boots and boobs a lick of paint, and return her to her former glory.

Roland Rat

Or "Rogul" as I used to call him. Roland was introduced to TV-AM the year I was born, so you could say we grew up together. I had this exact toy as a toddler and I don't know what happened to him. I like to think that this Roland is my long lost Roland, and now that we're together again we can go round the country spouting cockney vermin based puns at unsuspecting people.

Annuals

Bros annual 1989, Neighbours annual 1989, and a Home and Away 'special' from 1990. All three are stuffed with quizzes, pointless trivia and terrible photoshoots. I'm not sure what made me more excited when I got them home - finally getting to find out what the other one in Bros was called, remembering there was a character called Des in Neighbours, or finding a three page feature on Craig McLachlan of "Hey Mona" fame.

Pencil cases 

This is the find that really made me piss in my pants with excitement. They're all in excellent condition, but to be honest I would have bought them if they'd been ripped in half and covered in poo. I've numbered them for handy, cut out and keep reference -

1. 'Pencil Pouch' (this is generic but it's definitely old, because it comes with one of those round pencil sharpeners you don't get any more)

2. Transformers

3. Roland 'Rogul' Rat

4. A-Team

5. Bassett's Liquorice Allsorts

6. Munch Bunch yoghurts

7. Masters of the universe

8. Count Duckula

9. Generic Dracula pencil case, but from WOOLWORTHS if you please

10. A-Team

11. Hula Hoops

12. Wotsits

Now I'm going to go and bask in the glory of owning all these items. I'll probably stop short of getting naked and rolling around in them, but it will be a pretty close thing.

Pass The Parcel - like taking candy from kids

Who doesn't enjoy winning free stuff? Not I, even if it's only a plastic whistle shaped like a football. The winning is made even better when you have beat all the other children to claim the coveted reward.

There are two games that are guaranteed to bring out any child's latent competitive streak, for better or worse – Musical Chairs, and Pass the Parcel. I was never massively good at Musical Chairs, being neither too athletic nor handy with my fists, so sod Musical Chairs. But since Pass the Parcel requires no skill at all, and is little more than a game of chance, I was pretty good at it.

(Disclaimer - none of these children are me. I was never clever enough to be a scout.)

Winning at Pass the Parcel depended on two things. Firstly, on whether or not it's your party, and therefore your parent controlling the music. Secondly, on whether you got the parcel at just the right time to be able to slow down to not passing it at all, or to be able to snatch it from the child next to you at the right moment. Either move generally sets off a reaction like this -

It's also wise to time these moves, waiting until a reasonable number of layers of wrapping paper have been removed. If you perform the ‘too slow’ or the ‘too fast’ move more than a couple of times in each game, people will complain and you might end up being 'out' - the ultimate dishonour. To avoid this, use your moves sparingly. Please see below for recommended number of layers.

Recommended number of layers.

Of course, the above moves can only be executed if the parent in charge of the music has decided to be scrupulously fair and have their back to the group, thus avoiding the temptation to just let their child win. If the parent insists on watching you all like a hawk, never mind – at least you still have your party bag, which is often better than a crappy whistle. After all, whistles aren’t full of cake.

Knock a door run - advanced trolling (unless you're a 'der-brain')

My favourite game of all time. Even as an adult, it never fails to reduce me to a helpless pile of giggling.

The rules are so simple that even I could understand them – you knock on someone's door, then you run away and hide so you can watch the victim answer the door.  This genius ruse results in a pissed off homeowner left scratching their head.

In our childish minds, the victim would never be able to figure out what was going on, and would be forced to conclude he was dealing with some kind of ghost. In retrospect, they almost certainly knew it was “bloody kids.” Again.

A door.

Sometimes of course, things go wrong. But knock a door run is one of the few games on Earth that can occasionally be improved by gross incompetence. There are two ways to royally fuck up (improve) a game of knock a door run -

Forget to run away, or run away too slowly, or fall over while running away, causing yourself to be caught. You will then have to come up with a genuine reason for knocking like “Can I use your microwave?”

Choose a house where they're not in anyway, thus committing yourself to sitting in your hiding place, watching a door that's never going to be answered.

Either of these scenarios will be cause for much hilarity among the non-knocking players, and an excuse to punch the knocking player for “being a fucking der-brain.”

I heartily recommend this game on a Saturday afternoon when you have nothing else to do, but take care not to target a house where they can set their dogs on you, or a house whose owner is that weird guy who covers his windows with old newspapers.

We play the Just Seventeen 'Kiss Chase' board game, and end up with dreamy hunks!

Ok, I know I tend to talk a lot about my boyfriend in these posts (ironically, it was my boyfriend who pointed this out). There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, I am a needy woman who calculates her worth by the number of people she tells about the fact she has a boyfriend, and secondly, I only really do any interesting stuff when he's around. The rest of the time, when I'm not at work, I sit around in my pants, criticising people on TV who are younger and thinner than me, and worrying that a plane will crash into the roof of my house.

Today, however, was one of the aforementioned days of doing interesting stuff. Admittedly, it's only interesting if you're me. I went to the car boot sale, and came back with the single greatest thing known to man. When I first spotted it, hiding among various bric a brac in a box marked 'everything 50p', I thought it would be a mildly funny passing diversion and nothing more. Not so. This item is so life changing and marvelous that it really deserves its own Nobel Prize. Or at the very least, a Blue Peter badge. Ladies and gentlemen and psychos of the internet, I present to you -
THE TOTALLY RADICAL JUST SEVENTEEN KISS CHASE BOARD GAME!

It's going to take me a while to write this post, since I keep getting all girly and excited, and having to do things like squeal and put glitter in my hair.

The JUST SEVENTEEN KISS CHASE BOARD GAME is a game for 2 or more moronic players who, for today's purposes, were going to be me and the mister. yes, the mister actually agreed to play this dross with me. He must really like going out with me, for some godforsaken reason.

The aim is to go round and round and round and round and round the board, collecting tokens, which you exchange for different tokens, which you then exchange for DREAM DATE CARDS! Here are the accepted token exchange rates -

1 kiss token = 1 kiss token
3 kiss tokens = 1 snog token
3 snog tokens = 1 date tokens
3 date tokens = 1 DATE CARD!

As you can see, the game goes on for fucking years.

There are three different date cards to collect, which determine where you go, how the date goes, and most importantly, who your outdated hunk from the 90s will be!

And now - the board!

As you can see, it's a bit like Monopoly, except there are no houses, no properties, no silver counters, no money, no banker, and no jail. In fact, it's hardly like Monopoly at all. But there are cards, which you get in Monopoly, so shut up.

The dream boy, dreamy date location and dream date cards should be pretty self explanatory, if you were paying attention earlier. The two other sets of cards are the question cards, which contain a question the player must answer to get a kiss token, and the UH-OH cards, which contain a dare! And, might I add, the shittest dares known to man. But more of that in a minute.

So, me and the mister went round the board, dutifully throwing threes and sixes and landing on inconsequential squares. Then we began to land on question and UH-OH squares! The questions were the kind of 90s tween drivel you might expect - what was the name of MN8's first single, which town are Boyzone from etc, and we answered up to some of them right. The UH-OH cards were much more entertaining. Among the dares we got got were the following, although I won't embarrass the mister by sharing which were his dares -

- do a belly dance while singing the theme tune to Coronation Street
- do an impression of a pot-bellied pig until it's your turn again
- do a flamenco dance until it's your turn again
- say your address really really fast (not sure how this is a dare, unless you're worried about identity theft)

There were two other kinds of uh-oh/fucking hell cards - on some you had to name three types of something or other in ten seconds, and on the rest you had standard, Monopoly-esque life challenges, such as "oh shit, your mum threw out your East-17 pants, miss a go!".

One other thing - there were a few squares on the game board containing various triumphs and dilemmas - one was something like "Ant and Dec are fighting over you, lose two kiss tokens", and "OMG, Gary Barlow dedicated a song to you, collect a kiss token!" The mister got especially excited when he landed on these squares.

As the game progressed we collected tokens, and soon (after about seven hours) we discovered who our dream dates were! At first I had Damon Albarn from Blur, and He had Paul Nicholls off of Eastenders, and off of Paul Nicholls' life and stuff. Luckily, we had the option to swap our dream dates.

My date was odd cap wearing, chisel faced cockney songwriter and friend of drug barons Tony Mortimer from East-17 -

The mister's date was lush but gay and sadly now deceased Boyzone singer Steven 'Steve' Gately -

Next, after much faffing, we exchanged tokens for dreamy date location cards, and discovered the following -

Tony Mortimer was going to take me to the football, which I was apparently going to have to put up with, as a girl (I would put up with it, as long as he didn't take me to see Millwall) -

The mister was luckier - he was going to be taken to Blackpool where, bizarrely, he is then ordered to be sick into Steven Gately's lap -

The tension is building now, and we're this close to having a full on row over who wins (clue - we're not really). After what seems like hours/days/weeks of dice rolling, the mister is finally victorious! He gets the date card first, so presumably he wins his dream date! I'm not going to tell you what his dream date actually involves, so let's just go with Steven Gately and some sick for now -

I fare a bit worse, and end up dumping the 'gorge' Tony Mortimer -

Although, in retrospect, maybe I really won...

Anyway, here is the mister celebrating his victory -

Other dates we could have won include -

- You take Seal to LegoLand, where you sneeze in his face

- Chesney Hawkes takes you to Wyndsors World Of Shoes, where you shove a sandal up his bum

- You Take Andy Crane to Pizza Hut and kick him in the balls

- Right Said Fred take you to Alton Towers, where you shit in their hats