The Horror Of Milton Bradley Board Games

Now most people grew-up playing Milton Bradley board games, we had more than our fair share floating around our house when I was a kid. I spent hours destroying people at Connect 4 (1974), learnt how to cheat every time at Downfall (1973). I regularly threw a strop if I didn't make it to Millionaires Mansion in Game Of Life (1978), but would do an in-your-face dance around the room if I did. I refused to contort myself into all kinds of shapes, while smelling someone's arm-pits while playing Twister (1966), and would flop out of the game as soon as intimate body parts got too close for comfort. We lost the body parts to Operation (1966), had no more ball-bearings left to play Crossfire (1971) and ending up using the pills to Pac-Man (1981). But among all the Milton Bradley games we had, the one thing I only realised recently was the number of horror themed board games we had in the house. And despite their logo that they used right through into the mid-80s, that claimed their products were a "key to fun learning", they were actually getting kids to channel the dark-arts through their infuriatingly fun board games.

From classic movie monsters to witches, with a seance through in for good measure, all in a haunted house, a ghost castle, or a dark tower, Milton Bradley knocked out some great horror and fantasy based board games over the years. Here I present a list of the ones we had eerily had floating around our house when I was a kid. Which just happens to be most of the ones they did on a horror or fantasy theme during the 1970s and 1980s. These games were ingenious, fun, and ridiculously strange. But as kids we'd play them for hours, argue over the most simple rules, but come away fully entertained.
Séance "The Voice From the Great Beyond" (1972): Now a bit of a cheat, as we didn't actually own this one, but I do remember playing it at a friend's house. And it's one of the earliest board games I remember playing. Though I would have been much too young to play or understand the rules at the time. The game came with a tiny little working record player. Players would have to bid on dead Uncle Everett's possessions and the high bidder listens to instructions from their dead Uncle via the aforementioned record player. When all the items have been bid on and acquired, the record (which was hidden in the plastic desk) was turned over and would tells the players what each of the items was worth or what was due in taxes for the item. The player with the most cash at the end of the game is the winner.
Which Witch? (1970): Now the second game I remember playing as a kid is Which Witch, which I later owned as the renamed Ghost Castle, though I always hankered for the original version. It was easily one of my favourite board games ever, because of the 3D "haunted house" design, and moving parts it had. Just like the haunted houses I saw in Scooby-Doo cartoons at the time. There was the suspense of dropping the ball down the chimney and seeing which of the four booby-traps it would set off, sending a playing off the board, and back to square one. The game had players in genuine suspense, as they made their way through the haunted house (or in the later version castle). As I child I fully immersed myself in cardboard world of the house, and could feel my heart racing as the ball fell down the chute.
Monster Mansion (1981): Now I'm sure we picked this one up from a charity shop and some of the tokens were missing, and we could never fully play it properly. All the same, it makes the list. Players had to move their pawns with great trepidation through the haunted house in search of four different coloured treasures. When a player lands on one of the 40 face-down tokens on the board (this is where we came unstuck, I don't remember us having all 40), they flip it over where they might discover a treasure, a helpful token or... duh, duh... duh... A famous monster of the movies. They were all classic monsters from the Universal canon, including  The Mummy, Mr. Hyde, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein and Wolfman. 
Dark Tower (1981): Delving into the world of fantasy and an early "electronic" board game. We got this around the same time I was heavily into the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy books. The idea of the game was to amass an army, collect the three keys to the Tower, and defeat the evil within. An epic game brought to life in dodgy early electronic computer form. In the middle of the game board stood the Dark Tower, a plastic battery operate fortress of doom. Unheard of at the time, this was an innovation in board gaming, as players had to input their moves on a small membrane keypad each turn and the computer took over from there, doing everything from conducting the progress of battles to keeping track of how much (or little) food was left to feed the players' always hungry warriors. It even played music! Astonishing for its time considering I'd only just got my first home computer, a Commodore 64, around the same time. 
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