Mae's Real Stories

Our family owned several board games. Everyone we knew had Chinese Checkers and regular Checkers. Checkers was for only two people. Good players would win most of the time, because they knew how to plan their game. Chinese Checkers was more fun.

If you had a lot of kids together, you could play a 6-way game of Chinese Checkers, which was really fun and different from a game with only two or three players. We always seemed to lose some of the marbles that this game used.

We also went to friends' houses to play games. I had a good friend named Dorothy. She liked a game called Hex. This game had a game board and a number of blue and yellow wooden tiles with six sides each -- hexagons.

Hex was a game for just two people: one person used yellow, one blue. The board was divided up into hexagons the same size as the tiles. The players took turns placing one tile at a time on the board. You could put the first tile anywhere, but then I think you had to put the others next to one that you had already put down. You played until one person's tiles made a row that went from one side to the other. Dorothy knew how to win most of the time. I think she practiced when no one was there, or maybe one of her older brothers played with her so that she got very good at Hex.

Arny liked Monopoly. We didn't have a Monopoly game, so he played with Lisa and Ricky across the street. A lot of kids would all go to Lisa and Ricky's house to play a game that lasted for days sometimes. In Monopoly everyone starts with a lot of play money. They take turns and move little tokens around the board.

If you were unlucky you got a card that said "Go directly to jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200." If you went to jail you might not have a chance to win. But if you were lucky you got to buy lots of property and build hotels and houses on the property. Eventually, the winner gets all the money.

Elaine wrote: "I did NOT like Monopoly. I did like Scrabble and Clue. Monopoly was boring, especially the way Arny et al played it--forever. Joel learned to beat me in Monopoly by the time he was 5." So I was wrong when I first wrote that she liked it too.

At our house, we had two mystery-solving games called Who and Clue. When you played Clue you got to ask a lot of questions about who had done a crime. Each person had a game name like Colonel Mustard.