Whoever came up with those colors was a genius, for back in the day, I could look at the deep blues and greens and oranges of the property squares for hours. There was a set of instructions which- like the roadmap I always set aside on long road trips, in favor of my less reliable sense of direction- we would give a quick, but insufficient going over before diving into the game itself.Īnd then there was the board. Inside were all of those little wooden houses and hotels, the dice, the pewter playing pieces (iron, dog, hat, ship, etc.), the yellowish business card-sized Chance and Community Chest cards, and all that pastel-colored money- 1$ white, 5$ pink, $10 yellow, $20 green, $50 blue, $100 beige, and $500 goldenrod orange. It came in a 6” by 6” cardboard box, the board separate. It just showed up one day in our living room, a used version from the forties or fifties that some relative must had gifted to us. Bingo was the same.īut Monopoly- that was a different thing entirely. Same went for the Merry Milkman, whose hundreds of parts I only remember seeing once, on Christmas morning in the very early Sixties. And because the pieces were small and easily lost (or ingested), it wasn’t long before the game was rendered unplayable, disparate parts of the cootie eventually relegated to the Toybox of Doomed Game Pieces. One was that at six or seven years of age, I didn’t grasp the concept.

The object was to take turns trying to be the first to assemble a complete bug body. It was made up of red, yellow, green and blue plastic bits that represented the head, body and legs of a cootie-like bug. The Cootie game, with all those cool-looking colored pieces, was doomed from the start. And be When I was a kid in the early Sixties, board games came and went like frost in the sun. When I was a kid in the early Sixties, board games came and went like frost in the sun.

Monopoly strategy