The True Stories and Real Facts Behind
America’s Classic Children’s Games
by Bruce Whitehill
published at Parents Choice magazine online Nov./Dec. 2004: http://www.parentschoice.org/
American game companies have been making games for children since the mid 1800s. Back then, lots of them were designed to teach morality, or instruct in subjects such as geography, history and literature. Of the many thousands of games produced over a century and a half, few managed to last beyond a generation or two. The ones that did, and are still around today, we consider classics. The August issue of Parent’s Choice covered the histories of some classics played around the world, including the children’s games of ANAGRAMS, AUTHORS, BATTLESHIP, CHECKERS, CHUTES AND LADDERS, CLUE, MONOPOLY, PARCHEESI, PICK UP STICKS, and TIDDLEDY WINKS. Now we examine some of the other timeless kid’s games, many of which are unique to American culture. Many of these enduring games were manufactured by the two largest game companies of the 20th century, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. As both companies are now owned by Hasbro, the games below are available through Hasbro unless shown otherwise. The games are listed in historical chronological order.
After PARCHEESI, which received a patent in 1874, the oldest proprietary game for children is CARROMS. These large, wood boards (usually with corner pockets) were to children at the turn-of-the-century what NOK-HOCKEY (≤1947) was to the teenagers of the ’50s. The table-top boards, produced since 1889 by the Carrom Co. and Carrom-Archarena and others, offered multiple games, some being manual dexterity games played with cue sticks and wooden rings instead of balls; the cue sticks have been replaced by players’ snapping fingers. The Owl Game board, by Edw. Mikkelsen (≤1902) offered 100 games on a 28 1/2″ square board for $3.95; the Carrom-Archarena 100-game board, at $4.75 (prepaid “east of Omaha”) had 140 pieces of equipment, a revolving stand (free during a special 1903 promotion), and a “four-surface” gameboard (a smaller board fit inside the larger) on which you could play BACKGAMMON, CHECKERS, CHESS, CROKINOLE, POCKET BAGATELLE, and TWELVE MEN MORRIS. Carrom boards are still made today by the original company, now operating under the name Merdell.
PIT, a classic card game, was brought out by Parker Brothers in 1903. Invented by self-proclaimed psychic Edgar Cayce, this “trading” market game had cards representing grain commodities traded on Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange. PIT was unique in that all players played at the same time, rather than waiting for their turn. According to historian Philip Orbanes, in less than a year, three-quarters of a million games had been shipped out—three card manufacturers were employed to keep up with the demand—and by the end of one year of production, the game had earned more money than any other in Parker’s two decade history. PIT is the longest-selling proprietary card game in the U.S. In the 1930s, the cover was drawn by famous cartoonist and illustrator John Held, Jr. PIT is now sold by Winning Moves.
ROOK—named after a type of crow, not a chess piece—became another classic. George Parker and his wife Grace removed the ace and the picture cards in a deck of cards—still seen as objectionable by many groups especially in the South—and made a simple deck of four suits numbered from 1 to 14. ROOK was originally sold in 1906 under the company name, the Rook Co., in order to separate ROOK from the rest of Parker’s products. Like PIT, it became one of the best-selling card games of all time.
UNCLE WIGGILY is based on the Uncle Wiggily Bedtime Stories of Howard R. Garis (1872-1961), a staff member of “The Newark Evening News” and writer of children’s books. Uncle Wiggily Longears, an elderly rabbit gentleman, was created in 1910. The UNCLE WIGGILY game was initially introduced by Milton Bradley in 1916, although the first catalog listing wasn’t until 1921. The UNCLE WIGGILY gameboard changed in 1923, 1949, 1955, and in recent times. Metal rabbits hopped around the board between 1947 and 1953. The game stayed in the Bradley line until 1966. In 1967, Parker Brothers obtained the rights to UNCLE WIGGILY and published the game for a number of years. And in 1989, both Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers reintroduced different versions of the same UNCLE WIGGILY game, with Bradley listing the game in its 1989 catalog as “new.” Bradley obtained the rights from Howard Garis’ daughter-in-law, M.R. (Mabel) Garis, whereas Parker claimed “exclusive licensee under the rights of the late Howard R. Garis.” Oddly enough, the Parker game more closely resembled Bradley’s original UNCLE WIGGILY, with the object being to “Lead the rabbit gentleman through the forest to Dr. Possum’s office”, number 151. This was both Dr. Possum’s address and the last space on the board. The Bradley version, noticeably different and abbreviated, didn’t mention Dr. Possum, and had only 100 spaces.
In the very late 1990s, Hasbro lost the rights to UNCLE WIGGILY and the game is now produced by Winning Moves. Hasbro had further reduced the number of spaces to 91, introduced a quad-fold board (difficult for kids to fold and to move from one place to another during a game without the pieces falling off), and duplicated the sayings on many of the cards. Now, the board is two fold again, Dr. Possum has moved his office once more to space 100 (not the original 151—making for too long a game according to today’s parents), and every card has a different saying in rhyme—an important element in what the marketers call “a child’s first reading game.”
Incidentally, the 1952 edition was listed as “for little folks 4 to 10 years of age”; in 1954 the age range was changed to 4 to 8 years of age, in 1962 from 5 to 9, and in 1989 from 4 to 7; the 1989 Parker version was listed as ages 5 to 11. It’s back to “4 to 8.”
GO TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS, Milton Bradley’s game for children introduced in 1938, is one of the earliest popular question-and-answer games, with some questions akin to today’s trivia. It includes a booklet containing hundreds of interesting questions and answers, and is still more educational than trivial. GO TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS is now being sold by Winning Moves.
GAME OF THE STATES might attribute its success to World War II. Introduced by Milton Bradley in 1940, the game promoted America’s products and resources at a time when the importance of resources was paramount, nationalism and patriotism were running high, and the family needed to escape the reality of war and engage in play. The game became a staple for teaching children about the states and their industries. Incidentally, the title is one of only a couple which are recognized with its “Game Of” lead-in as being part of the game’s name. GAME OF THE STATES is now being sold by Winning Moves.
COOTIE is “classic plastic” with a manufactured history. The game was first put out in 1949 by the Schaper company, named after the supposed inventor, Herb Schaper, who claimed he whittled the cootie bug while on his mail delivery route. But the game was played as early as 1934—under the same title COOTIE—when it appeared in a magazine as a pencil and paper game, and then in 1939 as a boxed game by Transogram. Even earlier, in 1927, the exact same pencil-and-paper game was called TU-TEE, and played the same way as the current three-dimensional version. The put-it-together nature of the game gives it a fun toy-like element—depending on what number is thrown on one die, a player can draw parts of a bug: a body, head, or tail, or an eye, a leg, or a feeler. COOTIE is sold in England under the name BEETLE DRIVE, and still sold in the U.S. by Milton Bradley, a company that has modernized the long-running (or should I say long-crawling) game.
CANDYLAND, the colorful “no reading required” path game, became a children’s favorite after it was introduced by Milton Bradley in 1949. Its popularity rests, in part, with its unique method of play. Players draw a card and move to the next space on the board showing the same color as on the card, thus eliminating the need for dice. In 1984, this author, while working for Bradley, eliminated “Cotton Candy” and added “Stuck in Molasses Swamp” to match the board illustration to the text. At the same time, Bradley lowered the suggested age range of “4 to 8” to “3 to 6.”
LABYRINTH, the steady-hand, maze-in-a-box game, is one of the most copied games. The game was never properly copyrighted in the U.S., so the original manufacturer does not have the rights to the title “Labyrinth.” The dexterity game was brought to America by Brio, a Scandinavian company with a subsidiary in Wisconsin. (“Brio,” established in 1884 in Osby, Sweden, stands for “Brothers Ivarsson of Osby.”) The idea for two knobs used to control the horizontal and vertical tilt of a maze board was originated by a young Swede in the early 1940s. First manufactured in 1946 and introduced to U.S. markets around 1950 by FAO Schwarz and Abercrombie & Fitch, it is one of the oldest pure dexterity games still played today. Brio still manufactures the game with the original maze board. Early claims included that the game “has been found useful in rehabilitating shell-shocked war veterans.”
STADIUM CHECKERS, a three-dimensional skill and action game put out by American Toys in 1952 and also by Schaper, consists of concentric, movable plastic rings which link up pathways, the object being to get your marbles from the outer ring into the center. Like other three-dimensional plastic games with movable parts and marbles as playing pieces, such as FIVE ALIVE, STADIUM CHECKERS has been a young folk’s favorite for decades.
BLOCKHEAD, the wonderful wood block balancing, stacking game, was popularized in 1954 after being marketed by Saalfield Publishing. Its origins actually are two years earlier. The game was invented in 1952 by the late Gerald D’Arcey, and produced by him that year under his own name, “G.W. D’Arcey, San Jose, Cal.” (The original box, now very rare, was rectangular, and yellow and black; in its second year the box was square and multicolored.) D’Arcey sold the game outright to an agent who later placed BLOCKHEAD with Saalfield, and, in doing so, became quite wealthy; D’Arcey didn’t, since he lost all rights and royalties. The game, sold to Parker Brothers and then Pressman Toy Corp., is the only mass market game still made in wood. Its fun is in the tactile aspect of the blocks as well as in the simplicity of the game. It plays well because it stacks well–until it topples.
RACKO, a 1956 Milton Bradley rummy-style card game played with cards set into a special rack, has been reintroduced after a long absence. The game was switched from Bradley’s line to Parker Brothers’ (both companies are owned by Hasbro) when Bradley’s entire line of card games was switched over to Parker around 1992. Incidentally, two new games use the same interesting mechanism employed by RACKO: 10 DAYS IN AFRICA and 10 DAYS IN THE USA, both published by Out of the Box.
YAHTZEE is the only classic game of dice. Produced as YAHTZEE in 1956, it was sold by E.S. Lowe, the man who popularized BINGO in the United States. The game, invented by Lowe’s friends, was originally called YACHT. YAHTZEE is sold by Milton Bradley, the company that purchased the Lowe line in 1973.
CAREERS was first published by Parker Brothers in 1957, and taken off the market in 1984. CAREERS FOR GIRLS made a brief, unpopular, sexist showing in 1988 and was gone in ’89. The game was brought back by Tiger Electronics in the 1990s. The various editions all employed the unique concept of allowing players to choose their goals—a combination of money, fame, and happiness—which they then needed to achieve in order to win. CAREERS provides a good mirror of our culture. Over the years, “Uranium Prospecting in Peru” and “Journey to the Moon” gave way to “Ecology” and “Computer Science” as career paths; “Florida Vacation” was moved to a “Hawaiian Holiday”; and “Park Bench” turned into “Unemployment.”
LIE DETECTOR, a deductive reasoning game, is considered a classic whether you buy Mattel’s 1960 original, collectible version or new Pressman game. Mattel remade the game in 1988, then closed its game division and sold to LIE DETECTOR to Pressman in 1989. Modifications to the scoreboard were made when this author worked on the remake while at Mattel. For the new version, all the smokers were eliminated—they now wear pins instead—and the “gangster” was promoted to “racketeer.” And in an effort to be trendy, I guess, Mattel eliminated the “teacher” and replaced her with a “psychic reader.”
AGGRAVATION, a PARCHEESI-style game using marbles, was first published in 1962 by a company called CO-5, and then bought by Lakeside in the early 1970s. It differs from PARCHEESI in that there are shortcuts on the board that may be used when traveling from base to home. The game was eventually bought from Berl Industries and produced by Milton Bradley in the 1980s and is still in Hasbro’s line.
MOUSETRAP was a 1963 entry from the Ideal Toy Corp. that soon became the classic “chain reaction” game. Similar to the workings of a Rube Goldberg drawing, the game employed a series of connecting chutes and levers and other gizmos that would be set in motion by the movement of the first piece. Ideal was bought by CBS, which in turn was bought by Milton Bradley, which was bought by Hasbro, the company that now produces MOUSETRAP.
OPERATION is the classic manual dexterity game. Players try to remove miniature items—body parts—from small, metal-rimmed openings cut into a three-dimensional game board. The cardboard cover depicts a body with openings through which players try to remove such things as the funny bone or a butterfly in the stomach. If your metal tweezers (the forceps) make contact with the metal opening, you are “buzzed” out. OPERATION has been sold by Milton Bradley since its inception in 1965. The dexterity electric game concept is not unique, however, as ELECTRIC JACK STRAWS from decades earlier was a game in which players removing “pick up sticks” from a container would set off a buzzer if they touched the edge of the canister with the metal tweezers. The same theme was used for DaMert’s ALIEN AUTOPSY, and WPF’s ALIEN ANATOMY, both from 1997. Even adults enjoy the challenge, and it’s one of those games where the kids can often best their parents.
TWISTER is the only classic game to feature the players rather than the game board. As players interloop body parts while trying to reach different areas on a vinyl floor map, observers have as much fun as the players. The popularity of this party game was credited to Ava Gabor after she bent over and displayed her talents while demonstrating the game on the Johnny Carson show. TWISTER was rolled out by Milton Bradley in 1966.
TRIOMINOES, the three-sided dominoes game that has been a classic in Pressman Toy Corp.’s line since 1968, dates back to the 1800s. Triangular dominoes variations include one called TRI-DOMINOES, OR THREE CORNERED DOMINOES, brought out in 1932. In 1938, the game came out under the name of CONTACK, and was picked up by Parker Brothers and sold from 1939 through 1967.
BOGGLE has been around since 1973. It is the best word game since SCRABBLE, and it has the unique feature of players getting no score for identical words made by more than one player.
HANGMAN is another classic pencil-and-paper game produced in boxed form many years after it first appeared. Milton Bradley introduced the word-guessing game in 1976, dropped it from the line in the 1980s, and reintroduced it in 1989.
A three-dimensional plastic version of HANGMAN called SUSPENSE was sold in the 1950s; it consisted of plastic body parts that hooked together and were suspended from a plastic gallows.
So many children’s games are mindless, derivative, or simple “roll-the-dice and move-along-the-path” games based on some licensed character. Yet the many games described here have lived for decades, and are either challenging, intellectually stimulating, or, at the very least, amusing. Played by one generation after another, these are America’s classics.
