Monopoly is a terrible game meant to teach how Monopoly (business) is a terrible idea. There's plenty of good board games out there, such as Catan, or Power Grid.

To be fair to "Monopoly": that's in large parts because most people play it wrong.

I once read an interesting article about that issue...I don't know whether I would be able to dig up that exact article again, though.
However, a quick search showed that there are apparently dozens of articles to that regard.

From the first result of my search (quote): "...nearly half of all Monopoly players admit to making up rules, while a whopping 69% of fans haven't even read them."

Really tells you all you ever need to know about Monopoly... XD

And I take it that using sidesteps around the Iron Curtain such as Hungary were exaggerated in possibility?

Yep, probably the first game right there - God's Game ... also known as Fire & Water. ;)
No ... and if you don't know what they are referring to then I cannot tell you, as you might not be old enough, maybe haven't learnt to feed the chickens yet ... and I wouldn't want to be the one to corrupt you. ;)

For an ordinary citizen, the borders were closed for visiting any "imperialist country", essentially any country that did not belong to the countries of the so-called "socialist camp" and with a capitalist system. Hungary was a "friendly" country to us during the era of the USSR, so it was possible to visit it.

But for this, permission from the KGB was required, direct involvement of the leadership in working with good characteristics, knowledge of the language, history, and cultural customs of the country being visited. Before approval, citizens were required to pass an exam on the material, and any little thing could derail the trip, for example, an envious neighbor could write an anonymous report with all the resulting consequences, including imprisonment for false denunciation.

Many envied the lucky ones who managed to go abroad, back they were awaited with gifts, foreign clothes, usually of much better quality, and delicious treats. From there, they also brought us toys that were not available.

For example, my parents bought me a toy train set with trains, it was made in Hungary and the quality was superb.

Those were difficuly, but at the same time wonderful times. There was almost nothing to buy in local stores for common people (rich elite had everything in their special shops), but at the same time what was available will never be ever again. For instance we had a cheap supply of birch juice (not that watered nonsence you can buy nowadays) and they put actual meat in our sausages back then, also we had a really good medicine and almost everything was free of charge. Plus we never paid for water supply in our households, and electricity was cheaper than air.

I was a young man when I first played Risk, which was late on Friday nights, with Pizza, when I was still renting with mates. Years later I was introduced to Shogun, which is quite similar in many ways to Risk, but much more appealing to me.

I see the PC version of that is on sale at GOG right now for only $1.99 AUD. Expansion DLCs are also cheap.
I don't recall ever playing it.

I feel the same, and are certainly not into overly complex games or spending heaps of money on them.

Well that was fascinating. Cheers! :)

It might be. It certainly sounds interesting and the screenshots look impressive.

Thanks for the link. :)

Yep, how could I forget Lego and Mechano ... had a lot of fun with those.

And to be fair to me, I did also say much hadn't probably changed 30 years later. ;)


Me too ... obviously. :)

Yep a lot of fun could be had outdoors playing games. I well remember the days of playing Cowboys & Indians or being a Pirate and walking the plank. Then there were matchbox cars played with in the dirt or indoors. And perhaps the most fun of all back then, plastic soldiers etc ... played in the dirt and grass ... war games. And let's not forget the game of Marbles, often played at school during recess.

Shame that.

My first experience with video games, was on my first PC, an Apple IIE, and I wasn't very impressed, and still have them on floppies somewhere.

A few years later, at work of all places, I was introduced to Quake during my lunch hour, on an extra Windows 3.1 PC, and that changed my whole view of PC gaming forever, meaning I no longer saw it as just for kids, and that a PC could be more than just using it for documents and databases. When work later updated their PCs for Windows 95, I bought one of the old Windows 3.1 ones from them, and that sent my Apple IIE PC into retirement.

And then upon investigation, and scrolling further down the page, I see there are heaps more DLCs, than the four promoted, and the price for the lot is something like $128 AUD for me. No thanks ... though I might grab the base game only.

49 DLCs in all it seems. LOL

Well, we had something else as well, like Go (for intellectuals) and Backgammon (for casual play), we also had other games to choose from.
Chess, however, seemed to be the most popular among the people around me. It was almost like an obsession. We would regularly watch chess tournaments and even the local news on TV would provide detailed strategy reports on notable chess games. Karpov and Kasparov, these names were well-known to us.
Many individuals would carry a compact version of chess when traveling or going on a picnic or camping.

Checkers, on the other hand, seemed to be mostly played by kids, for some reason. Playing cards were popular among everyone for casual entertainment, particularly during long train journeys.

I completely missed the Apple computers, including the Apple IIE PC. The early games on personal computers were not that great, and some looked bad even on both Apple and early IBM PC. For instance, Prince of Persia (1989) on Apple II is very limited and looks bad, but its re-release on IBM PC in 1990 is absolutely fantastic.

It's cool that Quake changed your view on games. It must have been a really powerful PC at your work since playing DOS games under Windows 3.1 was pretty laggy in my case. I used to restart the PC in DOS mode to play flawlessly and with added XMS/EMS memory. Windows 95 was not much help either; there were no good games for that OS, and DOS was better in every way until 1998 when Windows and DirectX finally took over.

How come you weren't impressed (or maybe even introduced?) by Doom games at your work? I thought it was all over the place according to media.

Quake 1 is still one of my favorite games. But before that, I was blown away by Wing Commander (1990) - mentioned already as my turning point in PC gaming experience - Another World (1991), Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Star Wars: X-Wing (1993), Magic Carpet (1994), Prisoner of Ice (1995), among many other cool games.

The fascinating aspect of the 90s was the consistent emergence of innovative and captivating game mechanics in every successive PC game—an element that is noticeably lacking in the present era.

I've certainly played more Checkers than Chess. Chess was a game I played more of as I got older, but not for a long time now, and it was mostly against my dad, me being the oldest child.

I didn't get around to playing Doom games and Duke 3D and Wolfenstein 3D until later, just simply because I needed to get a Windows PC at home first, and Quake was the only game on the work PC. The only other Windows games I had access to and played at that time, would have been Solitaire and Freecell. Quake was really the first game aside from the card games that I ever played on a Windows PC, and so quite revolutionary to my mind, having skipped the game development period up to that point.

So I very much enjoyed the Doom games and Duke 3D when I eventually got to try them, and even Wolfenstein 3D, if not as much.

I would have booted into DOS to play Quake, I seem to recall, and I eventually made up batch files with menus to play additional maps etc.

It might seem now, that PCs were common at home back then, but they weren't really, not amongst all the folk I knew, and the only few I knew with them just had Apple IIE or IIC. In fact, an aunt was a teacher and back in those days, kids used Apple computers at school, and she got me the Apple IIE cheap when the school upgraded their computers.

A few years later at work, and I got to know other gamers, when I started playing Quake, and we took it in turn with that one PC. I did not know any PC gamers beyond those folk. We watched one another play Quake, and kind of competed with each other finding secrets and completing levels ... quite the hoot back then.

Backgammon is another golden oldie game like Bridge is. I only ever played that a couple of times too, and not since.

Back in those days, my friends and I would try out all sorts of games, but then gravitate back to our favorites. As I said previously, it is all down to who you hung with and what we wanted to play consensus wise.

Of course I know exactly what you are talking about.
Had too much fun trolling you a bit. :)

Do you know the old video game Pipe Mania? It's about, erm, laying pipe...

When I first saw this topic, I was thinking "well, when I was little there was tabinet, remi, chess, Nu te supara, frate (which I now learned is a variant of that Ludo that everyone mentions), subah for the one that'd likely be more unusual, grandpa pulling that out for family gatherings when cousins and uncle came over, some poker when I got older and, more rarely... er, how could I find an English name for Popa Prostu'?" And looking for that last one I got to that site (in Romanian) of "childhood games"... And remembered a bunch more, toci, usually when one of my grandmothers got to pick, Piticot, Titirobil... Oh, found an English name for one, Nine Men's Morris, also Chinese checkers, which looked like so and was probably only played a handful of times before the marbles became separate toys and got scattered all over, this football game (author of that site can't recall the actual name and I definitely can't)... More rarely, pacalici or septica On some occasions when one cousin came over and got to pick, Cheat or War... And I have some mental images of one or two other specific board games not listed there, but no idea of the names of course.
The problem with these was that they were "multiplayer" and I never played well, or at all, with others, so it rarely was enjoyable, and usually between a chore and torture, as pretty much everything, since I had to interact and deal with people...
There was some construction set at some point, plus some large, low-quality construction cubes (think only 1x1 and 2x1 size, not sure if there was anything else, just a bunch of colors), and a handful of toy soldiers. Could use those on my own at least. But I'd usually do better just with my own mind, when I could be alone.
And, of course, I was 7 when I got the first computer and found something that actually was enjoyable, and I could play entirely on my own. But it was some ten years later when I managed to break away from any family gatherings or much involvement in any other way for that matter, so still dealt with those card or board games on occasion during that period.