Board Games Are Not Your Friend

Before I begin to reveal to you the secrets that common house hold board games have been hiding behind for years, first allow me to apologise to those faithful readers who have been disappointed by my dry spell over the past week. An epic streak of things to do and a lack of ideas caused the blog to run barren, so thanks to you who kept checking to see if I would ever come back, I appreciate it, and indeed, I have returned. Now, onto the Board Game Conspiracy.

I would wager that most of us here in the good ol' US of A are familiar with the popular children's game "Mouse Trap." What most of us aren't aware of is the money grubbing scheme hidden boldly behind this game's little plastic pieces of doom. In theory, Mouse Trap is a great game; you build a mouse trap and then attempt to trap your friends and watch them rot to death in a little red cage until their cute mouse-y flesh just falls off the bone. The sweet thrill of literally starving your opponent to death is just to tempting for most children. But the slightly morbid concept of this rat race is not where the evil lies.

Having played Mouse Trap a lot as a child I'm not surprised that I never noticed it's dark side until now. Youngins are fast to forgive a board game when it doesn't work perfectly, and they probably won't remember what broke last time even as it fails to work the next time, but thinking about it recently I saw the true blatant money hunger behind Milton-Bradley, and it lies behind one little green diver.

Not once, in my personal Mouse Trap history, and nor in that of several of my board game playing cohorts (see. Tim and Emily Smith) has the little green diver ever landed right on that see-saw. I'm not asking for rocket science in my games, but I don't want the one trajectory based part of it all designed by a mentally unstable freshman in a Physics 101 class with a crippling case of ADD and the entire Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade outside to distract him. That little green diver my friends is the brilliant part of Milton-Bradly's scheme. Let's assume you're a parent with the means to purchase another set of Mouse Trap if your child requests it. When little Timmy comes into the living room, and interrupts Judge Judy with tears steaming down his cheeks because the cage never fell. His entire set of innocent little hopes and dreams was crushed when the diver didn't land on the see-saw and he never saw the Rube Goldberg style contraption reach fruition. What do you do? How do you respond to that show of infinite sadness? You don't have a physics degree, you can't solve the case of the Demon Diver. So you take a deep breath, accept that these were the duties you took on as a parent, and so help you God the second that Judge Judy is over you march yourself right out to K-Mart and you buy another copy of Mouse Trap, feeling more satisfied as a parent that you ever have before.

You, hypothetically, have been had by the Board Game Conspiracy. There's nothing wrong with that diver. The see-saw isn't broken. The game simply isn't designed to work. How else could they get you to buy another product? Expansion sets? I don't think so. And the worst part of the scheme is this my friends. Say you get home with that game, but now its 9:00. Not only is 24 starting, but its also coincidentally little Timmy's bed time. And tomorrow, his natural childlike attention deficit disorder makes him forget the game ever existed. But in a few months during a fit of boredom he'll take it out to play again, and once again his world will fall apart as that unholy diver lands refuses to land on that midnight sea-saw. Once more, you will trek to your local corruption dealer and buy into the Conspiracy. And the thing is, no one can complain, because the piece is perfectly intact. There isn't a single concrete issue with the game, so no lawsuits, no letters of complaint, no nothing. Nice work there MB, clever.

And that ladies and gentlemen, is why companies like Milton-Bradley can exist despite not producing a real game in over ten years. And by real game, I do not mean slapping Dora the Explorer on a previously made game. I want to see some ingenuity here people! I want a board game that will wake up the world! But it won't happen as long as they can keep making that nice little diver fail to stick his landing. And they will people, they will.