The New Family Game Night

Last time I said I was going to explore my single life and what I’m going to make of it but that is taking more thought that I originally…uh…thought.  I need some more time to get it all straight but I am trying to put at least two of these posts out each week and I’m behind so let me make a slight digression and talk about something else right now.  Namely: games.

I had my daughters this weekend and my oldest wanted to have a family game night.  First of all, I was happy to hear this.  For the most part, my daughters now have two families. The one with their mother and one with me and it warms my heart to hear her still refer to family and include me in it.  I know that’s kind of silly on my part but when you are not around your kids 24 hours a day; you tend to think you’re second fiddle when it comes to real family.  Again, silly but it’s the world I live in right now.

Second, we needed games to play.  I have some but whatever games we had for the kids, the MMC has possession of them.  Not that we had a lot.  Our girls are really just getting to the age where they want to play games so our collection of kid based games has mainly been Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders.  Thus, we ventured to the store to get a couple more.  Our picks?  Hungry, Hungry Hippos and Kerplunk. 

I remembered these games as a kid so I was kind of excited to play them again because it’s been so long and I wondered if my kids would get as big a kick out of them.  We played Hungry, Hungry Hippos (HHH) first.  Let me say one thing about this game that I didn’t remember (or cared about) as a kid: it is LOUD!  My house, with hardwood floors and no curtains, amplifies just about any sound and the constant banging that is the main part of gameplay in HHH came across as a typical night in the streets of Beirut (assuming there is still a lot of gunfire going on in Beirut.  I’m really not sure but it’s my go to city when it comes to noisy warfare). 

Yes, HHC is a loud game and perhaps I’m too old but I eventually grabbed the ear buds from my iPod to wear while playing and it made it much more bearable.  At least as far as the sound is concerned.  The other problem I had with the game is the hippo head lock that occurred often in the midst of playing.  This is where the hippo head and neck gets out of whack and you can no longer control it with the flipper switch that is essentially lodged in the hippo’s rear end.  You have to pause your game to pull the neck out to get it to snap back into place.  Meanwhile all of the marbles are being eaten up by your opponents, namely my daughters who could give a crap about my lack of being able to play.  Since I am easily frustrated by little things, this served to annoy me to no end especially since it fell on me to unlock not only my hippo but my daughter’s hippos as well.  I momentarily became a veterinarian in the HHH world.

I wondered if both the noise and the constant hippo head lock was a problem with the original game.  I tend to think that stuff like this is being made much more cheaply today than back when I was a kid.  Call it old man syndrome, but I’m betting there was better hippo eating game craftsmanship back in the late 70’s when it first came out (yeah, I went to the Hungry, Hungry Hippos Wikipedia page for that bit of info).  I would love to compare an original game to the new one just to see.  Wonder if I could get one on eBay?

And while I’m on eBay for an original HHH game, I’d also like to get an original Kerplunk game too.  We played this one next and I was relieved because it wasn’t anywhere near as noisy but still I became frustrated with the set up.  If you don’t remember, Kerplunk is the game where you have a cylinder with a bunch of holes going around the middle.  You put a bunch of sticks through those holds and then put marbles on top.  The challenge is to pull out the sticks without any of the marbles falling.  The person with the most marbles at the end loses.  The problem with today’s version from what I remember about the one I played as a kid is that the sticks are now made of a bendable plastic instead of the original wooden ones.  When I was a kid, these were basically long toothpicks but now they are almost soft plastic. I can only imagine that some kid somewhere poked an eye out with toothpick-like ones and the family sued Hasbro or Mattel or whoever made the game and some governing body over children’s games said the sticks had to be safer thus the bendable, plastic ones were made. 

I’m not opposed to making things safer although I don’t remember any fatalities back when I originally played the game but these sticks are very frustrating to use during the set-up.  You see, since they bend, it’s hard to put them in a hole on one side and get them out of a hole on the other side of the tube.  When they were long toothpicks, it was relatively easy but now they bend down, up or to the side based on what obstacles they encounter going in.  Not a big deal with the first dozen or so but after that it’s an exercise in patience and time consuming just to get the game ready to play.  I also noticed that by the next day, some of the sticks were permanently bent thus further adding to the challenge of getting the game set up. 

Regardless of this, however, the game was still fun and let’s face it, it has the best game name in the history of game names.  Kerplunk!  I wonder if that is a legal word to play in Words With Friends or Scrabble?  If ever get that collection of letters, I’ll let you know.  I kind of doubt it but isn’t “kerplunk” a fair word to describe the sound of something dropping especially in water?  I’m sure I’ll throw it out there and get the all too familiar (to me at any rate): “Sorry, kerplunk is not an acceptable word.”  I’m now looking forward to having a K-E-R-P-L-U-N-K in my virtual tray in Words With Friends to try it out.  Wonder how long that will take?  Considering the number of games I currently have going, probably not that long and if it is legal, I would get the chance to use all of my letters!  Man, I am going to keep that in my back pocket for sure.

So, the new Family Game Night, despite the frustrations, was a success.  The girls and I had fun and even carried it over to the next morning after breakfast with a couple rounds of each.  I did, however, have to take careful inventory of all the different marbles and bendy sticks when we were cleaning up to make sure I had a complete set when we played again.

Before we do play again, however, I think I’m going to see if I can get some felt or something like that to put across the bottoms of the hippos mouths to act as a silencer.  Either that or throw an old set of ear buds into the game box so I’ll always have them.  Yeah, I’m old.  Deal with it.  I have to.