Traditional Games and Toys

[Chako]

I can remember playing with plenty of Fisher-Price toys when I was very young. Here is a web site that brought back a lot of childhood memories...

http://www.thisoldtoy.com/

[Wilfried]

Mensch ärgere Dich nicht



A game I played a lot during my childhood was Mensch ärgere Dich nicht (Dutch: Mens erger je niet).

As a matter of fact, about a year ago I played some games with friends and we had a lot of fun!   

Mensch ärgere Dich nicht is a German board game developed by Josef Friedrich Schmidt in 1907/1908.

The game was issued in 1914 and sold about 70 million copies. It is a cross and circle game similar to the Indian game Pachisi, the Colombian game Parqués, the American games Parcheesi, Aggravation, and Trouble, and the English game Ludo.

The name of the game means "Do not get annoyed" or literally "Do not get annoyed, man".

The name derives from the fact that a peg is sent back to the "out" field when another peg lands on it, similar to the games Sorry! and Trouble.

[Monrogue]

Mensch ärgere Dich nicht



A game I played a lot during my childhood was Mensch ärgere Dich nicht (Dutch: Mens erger je niet).

As a matter of fact, about a year ago I played some games with friends and we had a lot of fun!   

Mensch ärgere Dich nicht is a German board game developed by Josef Friedrich Schmidt in 1907/1908.

The game was issued in 1914 and sold about 70 million copies. It is a cross and circle game similar to the Indian game Pachisi, the Colombian game Parqués, the American games Parcheesi, Aggravation, and Trouble, and the English game Ludo.

The name of the game means "Do not get annoyed" or literally "Do not get annoyed, man".
The name derives from the fact that a peg is sent back to the "out" field when another peg lands on it, similar to the games Sorry! and Trouble.


(Image removed from quote.)

(Image removed from quote.)

Yeah, good advice that's hard to follow with a game like that   I love Aggravation

[Wilfried]

Rubik's Cube


Rubik's Cube is a 3-D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by the Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik.

Originally called the "Magic Cube", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980 via German businessman Tibor Laczi and Seven Towns founder Tom Kremer, and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year.

As of January 2009, 350 million cubes had been sold worldwide, making it the world's top-selling puzzle game.
It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.


I never tried it, but perhaps some of you did...     





Variations of Rubik's Cubes. Top row: V-Cube 7, Professor's Cube, V-Cube 6. Bottom row: Rubik's Revenge, original Rubik's Cube, Pocket Cube

[Sweety-Sama]

Oooh! What a lovely thread!!!

Just when I saw the title, I remembered an old toy of the Swedish region Dalarna in the middle of Sweden. It's a wooden horse that is hand painted, called Dalahäst. There are a lot of paintings for the horse, but most common is the red with ornaments. Today it's mostly brought in tourists shops and then put on a shelf, but back in 1600 it was common for fathers to carve and paint the horses in the long winters, so their kids had a toy to play with.
When I was a kid, we had a over 30cm high wood horse. A year before my birth it occurred that one of my sisters (just about learning to crawl) somehow got on a high windowsill with the horse sitting on. My father was asleep and my mother at work.  My sister pushed the horse down and it landed with its ears right between the eyes of my father. Bleeding like a pig he called my mother at work and screamed: a horse fell on my head! He still posses a scar between the eyes

The worlds biggest Dalahäst stands in Avesta with a hight of 13m and a length 12,8m, weighing 66,7t.

 


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First and only

[Wilfried]

Nice horse, Sweety-Sama!

I really like this kind of thing...   

[Wilfried]

Battleship (also Battleships or Sea Battle)


I played it quite often...


Battleship (also Battleships or Sea Battle) is a guessing game for two players.

It is known worldwide as a pencil and paper game which dates from World War I. It was published by various companies as a pad-and-pencil game in the 1930s, and was released as a plastic board game by Milton Bradley in 1967.

The game of Battleship is thought to have its origins in the French game L'Attaque played during World War I, although parallels have also been drawn to E. I. Horseman's 1890 game Baslinda, and the game is said to have been played by Russian officers before World War I.

The first commercial version of the game was Salvo, published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company.


A map of one player's ships and the hits against them, from a game in progress. The grey boxes are the ships placed by the player, and the cross marks show the squares that their opponent has fired upon. The player would be tracking the success of their own shots in a separate grid.

[Monrogue]

Oh yeah, Battleship is great fun too

[Wilfried]

I can remember playing with plenty of Fisher-Price toys when I was very young. Here is a web site that brought back a lot of childhood memories...

http://www.thisoldtoy.com/

 

[Chako]

Stretch Armstrong

I was never fortunate to have one of these but my neighbour did. We would play with this doll...er...action figure for hours on end. Billed as the indestructible toy...well leave it in the hands of a pair of 5 year olds and see how long it lasted. Poor Armstrong bit the dust when black goop came out of several tears. Man did that make a mess. I can recall my friend's mother not being all that happy that the stuff seeped all over the carpet in the basement.

[Wilfried]

Stretch Armstrong

I was never fortunate to have one of these but my neighbour did. We would play with this doll...er...action figure for hours on end. Billed as the indestructible toy...well leave it in the hands of a pair of 5 year olds and see how long it lasted. Poor Armstrong bit the dust when black goop came out of several tears. Man did that make a mess. I can recall my friend's mother not being all that happy that the stuff seeped all over the carpet in the basement.

I would rather consider you to be highly fortunate for not having owned one those "toys".     

They are quite simply appalling!       

http://www.cracked.com/article_19625_the-36-worst-action-figures-from-iconic-toy-lines.html

[MadPlumbarian]

How about a "My buddy and me"? JR

[Wilfried]

Nine Men's Morris


A game I played with my grandfather quite often was Nine Men's Morris, which we used to call Mühlespiel or Molenspel, in German and Dutch respectively.

I was somewhat surprised to discover, that this game is actually very old.


Nine Men's Morris is a strategy board game for two players that emerged from the Roman Empire.

The game is also known as Nine Man Morris, Mill, Mills, The Mill Game, Merels, Merrills, Merelles, Marelles, Morelles and Ninepenny Marl in English. The game has also been called Cowboy Checkers and was once printed on the back of checkerboards, which was the kind of board my grandfather used.

The board consists of a grid with twenty-four intersections or points. Each player has nine pieces, or "men", usually coloured black and white. Players try to form 'mills'— three of their own men lined horizontally or vertically—allowing a player to remove an opponent's man from the game. A player wins by reducing the opponent to two pieces, or by leaving him without a legal move.





A 13th century illustration in Libro de los juegos of the game being played with dice




This game can also be downloaded

http://nine-mens-morris.net/downloads.html


Here's a screenshot

[Spatha]

When we where growing up, we were to poor to pay attention. All we had to play with was a pile of sticks and a rock. And we had to share that rock. Oh yeah we played Chess too.
I played Chess, Checkers and Backgammon. Some card games. I still play Chess every now again.

that's us mobile

I always likes Chess, never was any good at it but always liked it!

Another game my grandmother had that I played with was a barrel full of monkey's, where you had to take one monkey and try to pick up all the others and make like a chain until they were all picked up.. JR

A couple of weeks back I found the Pick up Monkeys game in a cupboard at my Mum's house.



Another one that I thought of was the slinky spring.  We used to spend ages trying to get it to walk all the way down the stairs.

[SublimetalMsG]

What about traditional books? Like grimms fairy tales collection hard cover from Barnes and noble's. They have the fancy ones with the gold inly. Plus others a bit expensive for the fancy hard cover ones a pair of vice grips is cheaper. But we only live once so who cares lolz

[Monrogue]

Yes, Spatha, the slinky was a good toy.  I also was into Koosh balls at the time.

[Cupboard]

I was introduced to Nine Men's Morris this weekend by some medieval re-enactment bods, it was quite fun.

Traditional games that are still good:

Solitaire. Not the sort that you play on the computer, the jumpy-over-marble sort. I used to play this quite a lot at my grandparents' and I still do on occasion. The middle hole is empty. A move involves jumping one piece over another in to an empty space which removed the jumped-over piece from the board. The aim is to clear the board.



Backgammon. My dad and I played this a lot when I was younger. A set has recently turned up in my village pub so I've been trying to teach other people how to play. You start off with your pieces arranged around the board (like in the picture) and you have to get all your pieces back to your home quarter and then out which the other player does the same thing but in the opposite direction. You can take each other's pieces and send them back to the start.



Go. This is one I was only introduced to recently yet is one of the oldest games around. The idea is to enclose as much area as possible with your pieces whilst making sure your opponent can't capture it. A segment of stones "dies" if it has no "liberties", i.e. if it is (or cannot be prevented from being) entirely surrounded by the opposing player's stones.

[SublimetalMsG]

Ouji boards are classic any one ever play with one? They still sell them in the games section right next to monopoly at most stores