LoC #62 - Top 50 Tabletop Games

[Compound]

And we take a quick moment to recalculate numbers as there's a duplicate entry.

What do you mean a duplicate entry?

A glitch in the Matrix. A strange sense of Deja vu that came when reading the remaining entries.

[Compound]

Oh, and I checked my Mastermind. It has that same cover (the one where they're younger) except the game of the year star is on the right instead of the left. The first word is "Awarded". It says nothing about awarded by whom, or what year. And might I add: TWENTY GUESSES?! The one I have gives you ten. I guess they figure kids are getting stupider and stupider.

Or I misremembered how many chances you get. One of the two.

[Compound]

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, 15.

[Tripe]

The set I used had 15 slots on it.

[Compound]

#15: Uno

72Points (On 7 of 14 lists)
Highest Vote: (#7 by DB Barnes)

Publication Date:1971

Number of Players: 2-10

Designed by:   Merle Robbins

Publisher: Mattel

Description:
Players race to empty their hands and catch opposing players with cards left in theirs, which score points. In turns, players attempt to play a card by matching its color, number, or word to the topmost card on the discard pile. If unable to play, players draw a card from the draw pile, and if still unable to play, they pass their turn. Wild and special cards spice things up a bit.

Hey, How Do I Win This?
Be the first player to play you last card. You then score points based on teh cards remaining in other players' hands. first player to a cetain point value (generally 100) wins.

Fun Gaming Facts:
The Uno world championship is held annually in Moscow. No, I have no idea why there. The last championship game took 5 hours and 16 minutes to play.  (The 2012 tourney is next week, BTW.)

There are psychological studies that detail people's tells in Uno games.

Dice:
None.

Purple and Orange?:
No. Uno uses the traditional four colors.

Awards & Stuff:
None

Related Games that Received Votes:

Related Games that Didn't Receive Votes:
Crazy eights, which plays quite similarly to Uno. Plus, it's O-Ren Ishii's gang, divided by 11.

Hey! It's an Amazon link with the price! $6.55

Next Turn:
My one game rant in this list!

[CJones]

Well I notice that Chess has mysteriously vanished. I knew it couldn't be at #19.

[Compound]

# 14: Hungry Hungry  Hippos

73 Points (On 7 of 14 lists)
Highest Vote: (#10 by Thrifty)

Publication Date: 1966

Number of Players: 2-4

Designed by: Fred Kroll, Masatoshi Todokoro

Publisher: Milton Bradley/ Hasbro

Description:
Two to four players, each controlling a plastic hippo, try to gobble as many marbles off the playing field as possible.

Hey, How Do I Win This?
It's just above here. The description was a whole sentence long. You're so lazy that you couldn't read that?

Fun Gaming Facts:
My rant. Okay, watch this commercial.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/R1x8GzWZbpU?version=3&amp;" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/R1x8GzWZbpU?version=3&amp;</a>

Did you watch it? Good. See the kids in the video? That's not how you play the game.

Oh, it may be the way you played the game, since you know, you've seen it played in that way in the commercials, but that's not the way the game was originally supposed to be played. When the game was originally released, the rules for the game were to release a single marble onto the field and the players then try to chomp it then the next player released of one their marbles. Yes, one marble at a time. And yes, it does play exactly as boringly as it sounds. 

But at some point, possibly due to the realization that no child on the planet actually played it in a method other than "send as many marbles as possible" onto the field, Milton Bradley added an "advanced" rule that just affirmed the way that everyone played it in the first place.  So now you know.

Also, in a 1990 New Yorker, Edward Allen wrote a short story named after the game. The New Yorker's synopsis:

The narrator reminisces about his first year out of college, in the seventies, when he was unemployed and spent his time watching television. He lived in a cabin, in what had once been a Jewish summer resort. His taste ran to reruns of shows from the fifties and sixties. He especially remembers the commercials, particularly one for a children's game called "Hungry Hungry Hippos." In the nineties, he thinks about the days in the seventies when he chose to live among the remains of the fifties and sixties, and could have used some encouragement about the eighties. He wishes that he could go back and tell himself that his poverty would be as insubstantial as his education. Aboard an airplane during a business trip in the present, he recalls the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" as a symbol of his experience in the seventies.

Sounds like a laugh a minute fun ride!


Dice:
No.

Purple and Orange?:
Yes! Orange is used as a standard color and that pink-looking hippo is allegedly purple.

Awards & Stuff:
None.

Related Games that Received Votes:

Related Games that Didn't Receive Votes:

Hey! It's an Amazon link with the price! $22.23

Next Turn:
We take a trip into Hinduism.

[Compound]

#13: Chutes and Ladders
a.k.a. Snakes and Ladders

75 Points (On 5 of 14 lists)
Highest Vote: (#3 by Monty)

Publication Date: 200 BC

Number of Players: 2-6

Designed by: Unknown

Publisher: Public Domain

Description:
Traditional game from ancient India was brought to the UK in 1892 and first commercially published in the USA by Milton Bradley in 1943 (as Chutes and Ladders). Players travel along the squares sometimes using ladders, which represent good acts, that allow the player to come closer to nirvana while the snakes were slides into evil.

Wow. How profound.

Hey, How Do I Win This?
By achieving Nirvana, man. Or by reaching the last square. Whatever.

Fun Gaming Facts:
There are Canadian versions of the game where the chutes are replaced by toboggans. No, really.

Oh, hey. Hello Kitty again.



Dice:
Yes! A six sider!



Purple and Orange?:
No.

Awards & Stuff:
Just the joy of achieving good karma, man.

Related Games that Received Votes:

Related Games that Didn't Receive Votes:
Candyland! Although without the karmic reward. I guess that makes it Unitarian.

Hey! It's an Amazon link with the price! $12.00

Next Turn:
For fun I'll do the next entry without any punctuation.

[Compound]

# 12: Yahtzee

81 Points (On 3 of 14 lists)
Highest Vote: (#9 by Kete)

And three votes at #13 too.

Publication Date: 1956

Number of Players: 2-10

Designed by: Unknown

Publisher: Milton Bradley

Description:
Yahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley (now owned by Hasbro), which was first marketed by game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe in 1956. The game is a development of earlier dice games such as Yacht and Generala. A public domain version of Yahtzee, which is popular especially in Scandinavia, is Yatzy. Yahtzee is also similar to the English game of Poker Dice and the Cheerio dice game.

The object of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. The dice can be rolled up to three times in a turn to try to make one of the thirteen possible scoring combinations. A game consists of thirteen rounds during which the player chooses which scoring combination is to be used in that round. Once a combination has been used in the game, it cannot be used again.

The scoring combinations have varying point values, some of which are fixed values and others of which have the cumulative value of the dice. A Yahtzee is five-of-a-kind and holds the game's highest point value of 50 (not counting multiple "Yahtzees" in the same game).

Hey, How Do I Win This?
Get more points than the other players. And try to say as many sentences as possible without pausing at all.

Fun Gaming Facts:
According to Hasbro, the game was invented in 1954 by an anonymous Canadian couple, who called it "The Yacht Game" because they played it on their yacht with their friends. Two years later they asked Emily Hoot if She would make up some sets to be given as gifts to their friends who enjoyed the game. Hoot perceived the possibility of marketing the game, and acquired the rights to the game from the couple in exchange for 1,000 gift sets. This story is expanded by Hoot in the 1973 book, A Toy is Born by Marvin Kaye. The story is reported much the same way in several books on games.

Peter Marshal once hosted a game show based on Yahtzee.

50 million copies of Yahtzee are sold every year.

Yahtzee has been cited as a precipitating factor in a case of domestic violence  and as the motive for at least one murder.

Oh, and yes. Hello Kitty again.


Dice:
Yes! 5 glorious dice, all waiting to be rolled!



And yes, I know Yahtzee uses white dice only.

Purple and Orange?:
Nope.

Awards & Stuff:
Games Magazine Hall of Fame Inductee

Related Games that Received Votes:

Related Games that Didn't Receive Votes:
The above mentioned Yacht, which predates Yahtzee and has slightly different scoring. Still dicey though.

Hey! It's an Amazon link with the price! $9.06

Next Turn:
Well the joke is spoiled, but I'll use that image anyway.

[Compound]

# 11: Battleship
a.k.a. Battleships or Sea Battle

94 Points (On 7 of 14 lists)
Highest Vote: (#6 by Thrifty)

Publication Date: 1967 with earlier versions predating WWI

Number of Players: 2

Designed by: Unknown

Publisher: Milton Bradley

Description:
Battleship (also Battleships or Sea Battle) is a guessing game for two players. It is known worldwide as a pencil and paper game which predates World War I. It was published by Milton Bradley Company in 1943 as the pad-and-pencil game "Broadsides, the Game of Naval Strategy", and as a board game in 1967.

5 ships of varying sizes are deployed onto a 10x10 grid and the players must deduce where the opposing ships are by shooting at them using the grid co-ordinates, i.e. "B-5."

Hey, How Do I Win This?
Sink your opponent's ships before they do the same.

Fun Gaming Facts:
One standard variant of the game is the "salvo" version where each player gets as many shots each turn as they have ships remaining.

The most recent version of Battleship uses a hexagonal map, a "captured man" on an island that must be found and two non-straight pieces (the carrier and a triangular weapons platform.)

In 2011, Hasbro introduced a miniatures based version of the game called Battleship Galaxies. It has pegs and the name, but not much else in similarity.

There are also Star Wars and PotC versions of the game.

Other similar games published:
Salvo (1938), Combat: The Battleship Game (1933), Broadsides (1943), Sink It (1943), Salvo (from Ideal this time, 1961), Swiss Navy, Sunk, Convoy, Wings, Naval Battle. And on electronic versions include Naval Strike, Naval Combat, Naval Clash, Advanced Mission, Super Battleship, Grid Attack and Battlefield.

Dice:
None.

Purple and Orange?:
No, grey ships. Red and white pegs.

Awards & Stuff:
None.

Related Games that Received Votes:

Related Games that Didn't Receive Votes:

Hey! It's an Amazon link with the price! $19.99 It's the movie tie-in version too.

Next Turn:
The top 10! I can't say anything without spoiling it other than one entry might seem familiar. See you then!

[Johnny Unusual]

# 14: Hungry Hungry  Hippos

Wow, really?  The popularity beyond saying the name of the game surprises me.  You really just push down on the tails a lot and hope for the best in my experience.

I still love Magic the Gathering.  Some of the new deck stuff isn't always fun, but I really enjoy it, even though I don't play it that much anymore.

Best representation of the Magic experience.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ze7Jw7Ky-Ys" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/Ze7Jw7Ky-Ys</a>

Also, 2:46 is every experience I have listening to rules to a new game.

[gojikranz]

i dont really get the hungry hungry hippos love.  battleship is pretty good we had the electric star wars version it was pretty awesome. 

l love backgammon its pretty much my go to though i generally play it on the computer not a tabletop...

[Tripe]

# 16: Backgammon

Related Games that Received Votes:

Two on my list are relatives if not direct ancestors of it, and I assume they'll not be showing up as we get into to the top ten.

[Thrifty]

i dont really get the hungry hungry hippos love.

Well it's better than playing The Waiting Game.

I voted for Hungry Hungry Hippos, as you can see.  I can't really explain it either.  I guess I just really like the game when I was a kid for some reason.

[Darth Geek]

SO Chutes and Ladders has an ancient historic, religious background? That's like learning Hungry Hungry Hippos is a deep metaphor for starvation in Africa.