Blast From My Past Pt9 - Sit down games...

Today kids only know of many sit down or party games. There's the classics of Monopoly, Cluedo, Risk and Scrabble as well as the ubiquitous Uno plus Jenga among other things. Taboo and Pictionary is a popular choice as well.

When we were kids, we used to play a ton of variant pakau games (flower comes to mind) as well as card games that had pics and specs of cars, airplanes and warships on them. Top Trump was a famous brand back then. We also had Happy Family, Donkey and other colourful cards to play with our family and friends.

For more mature players, there was dam/checkers, animal chess (cat eats rat which eats elephant) and chinese chess. There was also a Chinese variant of Monopoly called Millionaire. My favourite was a Monopoly variant with a fairground theme (can't remember the name).

Many have forgotten how to play Ludo, Backgammon, Snakes and Ladders and Pachisi and many board games have gone into obscurity. I even had a game based on the Disney movie, Black Hole.

There's an old chinese card game played by the old folks called Chiki (the Straits Chinese played them). I have a set at home but have no idea how to play it. The Malays had their congkak. I think in Malaysia, there wasn't a culture of playing Go/Weiqi though.

During the Apple II era, I was so in love with the game called Archon that I made my own table version using drawing block paper... but the rules I made were quite complex.