Category: Games

Funny Bones, 1968

Post author By Estelle
Post date July 13, 2016

For my birthday treat a few weeks ago, me and my husband went on a very rare kid-free trip to Heston Blumenthal’s Hinds Head pub to try a special menu – truffled beef stew as devised by Heston for Tim Peake on the International Space Station. The intense meaty, tarragonned stew was beautiful, of course, especially so as it was a menu only available if you wrote in to Channel 4 and were lucky enough to receive a special code after the Heston’s Dinner in Space programme a few months ago. The star of the show, however, was the Sweet Shop cocktail – a heady mix of “skittle-washed vodka”, frothed marshmallow, fruits and popping candy, with a wave of candy floss on top. It sounds far too sweet to be appealing, but it was perfect, like a kind of magical strawberry juice.

We stayed in Maidenhead for the night, and I fell in love with the place – not least because of the unfeasible amount of charity shops selling vintage books that we found, and the very friendly shop keepers within them. We were so keen on the fascinating stock in one shop that the lady behind the counter jokingly offered us a “lock-in”, which sounds like heaven to me. The fact that I loved Maidenhead so much funnily enough feels like a crumb of comfort to me in the current political situation – our new Prime Minister Theresa May is its MP.

We came home with heavy armfuls of new books on the train, and this game, Funny Bones, which was worth its price of £1 just to have a look inside the box at the glorious 60s graphics on the cards.

Brought out the year after Twister, this was intended as a version of that game as played with cards and teams of two partners. The cards themselves need to be held between the two body parts shown on the cards.

And this is how you play it:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNKqTybDCU8

I’d never heard of it, and was amused to see the none-more-60s description of where this game could be played – not only at birthday parties but also at “Adult Happenings”. “Happenings” always has an orgy vibe about it but it sounded to me like some marketing man trying to get hip with the kids.

A few of the cards, though…..they could be interpreted with a raised eyebrow.

And….well, it turns out that this undercurrent was actually a little more *finger bone on the nose bone* than I first thought. Marvin Glass, the creator of the game, seemed to be two parts the Willy Wonka of games, and one part Hugh Hefner. Twister was denounced by some critics of the permissive society as “sex in a box”, and it looks like Marvin Glass had at least one eye on this market too. Here an excellent blog post describes the career and inventions of the man behind an array of classic toys – including SIMON, the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and Mousetrap. Here’s the man himself demonstrating his new invention, the toy hypodermic needle, the Hypo-Phony:

But it was reading about his feature spread in Playboy magazine that most tickled my funny bone. Titled unambiguously “A Playboy Pad: Swinging In Suburbia”, here are the post watershed “fun and games” Marvin was working on.

You can see why Playboy were interested, this “pad” was up to the zeitgeist in 60s party terms. He had a “walk-in wet bar”, whatever that is, hi-fi controls built into a marble table, “a grand piano and microphones….awaiting the show-business personalities that invariably attend”, Picasso and Dali pictures on the walls, and a swimming pool.

It makes me think of a Hammer Horror porn film. I have a strange feeling of unease looking at these pictures. Go up the red-lit stairs:

To the bedroom:

And then hang out in the huge jacuzzi:

The best thing is, it depicts people actually playing Funny Bones at this “happening”.

I guess this was the kind of thing Monty Python was talking about – it breaks the ice at naughty parties.

In those halcyon days of early June, I suspected not that the purchase of this little game would bring me a blog post featuring the International Space Station, Theresa May, 1960s orgies and the game SIMON, but in this post-Brexit hinterland suddenly anything seems possible.

Tags 1968, Brexit, Funny Bones, monty python, party game, Playboy, theresa may

1900-1949 Food & Drink Games

Vintage recipes – Old Fashioned Cherry Cake, 1948

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 3, 2015

All the old school “Family Fun” games that I post from time to time remind me of just one thing – old fashioned cherry cake. Especially Up Jenkyns and Ghosts because those were the games we played with Grandad and Nan, and Nan generally provided the aforementioned cherry cake for tea. Proust had his madeleines, I have cherry cake.

Funny really, I’m not generally a fan of the glacé cherry, despite fresh cherries being maybe my favourite food ever – they’re what summer tastes like. But you need glacé cherries for this kind of cake. I had a hankering for one and searched through my old cookbooks for a suitably non-tarted-up recipe. I decided on one from The Radiation Cookery Book – originally published in the 1920s but updated and reissued for decades. I have the 1948 edition.

It’s the rich Madeira cake recipe, which has various alterations to make different cakes.

Cherry Cake

4oz/115g butter or margarine
4oz/115g caster sugar
4oz/115g glace cherries
2 eggs
6oz/170g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Grated rind of a lemon
Milk as needed

Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the eggs one at a time, and beat until the mixture is stiff and uniform.

Stir in the sifted flour and baking powder, adding milk if necessary to form a soft mixture which will shake easily from the wooden spoon.

Transfer to a tin lined with greased paper and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 hour and 5 minutes with the Regulo at Mark 4 (but I baked it at 180C for around 45 minutes).

This was how it turned out. It’s an art ensuring the cherries don’t sink to the bottom – an art I have not mastered, although it doesn’t really look that way from the picture. Tasted nice though, although I’d used fancy morello glacé cherries, which new-fangled it up a bit too much. Plus, the ones I used to have were round cakes, but there wasn’t enough batter for my cake tin and so it became a cherry loaf. To be fair, the recipe does say to double the quantities for a larger cake, which you would need to do for a 20cm cake tin.

Next time I’m trying the reliable Mrs Rea’s 1910 version, below.

Mrs Rea's Cookery Book, 1910 — Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910

The Radiation Cookery Book contains hidden treasure in the form of this scribbled recipe by the original owner for coconut ice, a none-more-Blyton kids treat, that I am planning to make soon:

Tags 1948, cherry cake, Mrs Dora Rea's Cookery Book, recipe, The Radiation Cookery Book, Vintage recipes

1900-1949 Games

Thursday Fun – April 1st Party, 1934

Post author By Estelle
Post date April 1, 2015

Happy April Fools Day! Who’s having an April 1st party? What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it?

Here’s Sid G. Hedges’ ideas from The Home Entertainer for such a party. “You must be careful, however, that all the guests are congenial and chosen carefully”, as this is not a party for those who take themselves particularly seriously. It’s a practical joke made into a party, really – motor horns under the front door mat, rubber coat pegs so your coat falls on the floor, serving fake food and luring your guests down dark corridors strewn with balloons and bells.

The games suggested are idiot-themed – “Dunderheads”, where people and professions are all mixed up and you have to identify them correctly, and “Hat Dance”, where you “Fit two players with dunces’ hats, and let them see who can first knock off the other’s.” I’m not sure if you have to use your hat to knock off the other hat like rutting idiot stags, or if you can just punch it off instead. A thought – did people used to actually manufacture dunce’s hats?

Tags 1934, April Fools Day, Friday fun, Games, Sid G Hedges, The Home Entertainer

1900-1949 Ephemera Games

Friday Fun – Jack and his Apples, 1922

Post author By Estelle
Post date March 6, 2015
2 Comments on Friday Fun – Jack and his Apples, 1922

From The Children’s Newspaper in 1922 comes a riddle:

Jack and His Apples
Jack was a very good natured boy and, meeting his younger brother just after he had purchased some apples, he gave his brother one third of the total number and one third of an apple. Jack then had one apple left. How many did he have in the first place?

Any ideas? I have to say, I was foxed by this, and cursed the fact that the solution was only available in the next issue, which I don’t have.

So, hooray for finding another online archive! The Children’s Newspaper was amalgamated into Look and Learn magazine in 1965 and the Look and Learn site has put up archived issues of the paper here

So I found the answer in the next issue. It’s right at the bottom of the below image, so as not to spoiler the answer if you’re doing it….

Tags 1922, Look and Learn, online archive, riddle, The Children's Newspaper

1900-1949 Games

Friday Fun – Rhubarb Charades, 1934

Post author By Estelle
Post date February 20, 2015

From Sid G. Hedges’ The Home Entertainer comes today’s game – “Rhubarb Charades”.

It’s quite an involved version of charades, where one team picks a famous person (in their example it’s Hitler) and then chooses further famous people whose names start with each letter of the original name. The team has to act out all the people in order, imitating them by only using the word “rhubarb”. It’s a nice idea but your impersonation skills would have to be pretty decent for the other team to not get fed up by the time you finally got to the main character.

It would be a good game for “Whose Line is it Anyway?” though.

Oh, look! It never fails to amaze me just how much is archived on the internet now. I’ve unexpectedly found the rather brilliant minutes dating from the 1945 meetings of Rothley Youth Club in Leicestershire

They certainly played a lot of games in their meetings. Not only “Rhubarb Charades” but also “Winking” as well. Maybe they had the same book as me?

Also, this bit!

Cor blimey!

Tags 1934, 1945, Friday fun, Games, Rhubarb Charades, Rothley, Sid G Hedges, The Home Entertainer, Winking

1950-1999 Games

Friday Fun – Ghosts

Post author By Estelle
Post date February 13, 2015

I haven’t got a book scan for this post, but this is a top game for any fellow word-lovers out there.

When we were little, one night a week me and my brother went round to my Grandad and Nan’s house for tea. We played games all night long, while eating crunchy spaghetti (Nan’s rather unintentional speciality) and cherry cake. Our favourite were Up Jenkyns ,Yahtzee and Ghosts.

Ghosts is a game of two halves – it’s starts off as a spelling game and then subtly turns into a fun and annoying exercise in sabotage. I’m sure there’s a million different rules of the game out there, but this is how we played it:

You need at least three people for this game, but four to six people is probably ideal. We played it as a spoken word game, but you could also write it down, which would be easier way to keep track of the letters. Everyone begins the game with three lives. One person chooses a letter to start and then everyone takes turns to add a letter onto the growing word. The aim is not to be the one to complete a word, and if you do, you lose a life.

You do need to agree a minimum word limit – we had the rule that three-letter words didn’t count as it would be pretty hard to avoid completing three-letter words all the time. You also need to have a word in mind when you add your letter as if the next person thinks you’re bluffing they can challenge you to state your word. If you can give them a valid word the challenger loses a life, if you can’t, you lose the life.

What tends to happen is that you’re thinking of a longer word, and you end up making a shorter word by accident – say, you’ve just added a “d” to SAN because you’re thinking of “sandwich” but, bad luck, you’ve completed “sand” instead.

So far, so straightforward.

The fun bit is when someone loses their three lives. In a lesser game, that would be it, the end of your go. But in Ghosts, the logical consequence of losing your lives is that you turn into a ghost. And, as a ghost, all players must pretend you don’t exist. If the ghost manages to get another person to talk to them, the player immediately loses all their remaining lives and becomes a ghost themself. The last non-ghost left is the winner.

I quite liked becoming a ghost in order to perfect the techniques of getting people to talk to you by accident. The best way is just to sit quietly for a while until they forget about you, wait until the rest of the players are concentrating on a tricky set of letters and then say something innocuous like “Does anyone want a drink?” or “It’s getting dark, shall I stick the light on?”.

Can’t wait to teach it to my kids when they’re good enough at spelling – although as they’re currently 5 and 1, I have a bit of a while to go….

There’s some more variations on Wikipedia.

Blimey, I love the game but a look at all the more expert ways to play hurts my head:

“Superghost (also known as Lexicant or Llano) is played by choosing either the beginning or end of the growing word fragment and adding a letter there. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA or ERAD.

Superduperghost is played by deciding whether to reverse the letters of the word fragment before adding a letter to the fragment’s beginning or end. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA, ERAD, NARE, or AREN. This variant was first broadly adopted at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona.

Xghost (sometimes also known as Superduperghost or Llama) is played by adding a letter anywhere in the growing word fragment, including between letters. For example, given the fragment ERA, a player might offer BERA, ERAD, EBRA, or ERMA. This version was invented by Daniel Asimov around 1970.”

The Radio 4 show “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” (which I had the pleasure of seeing live in Liverpool a few weeks ago) has its own version, called “Cheddar Gorge” in which you add whole words onto a growing sentence, and having to avoid ending the sentence. Here it is (any excuse to have a look at the divine Graeme Garden) –

Tags Friday fun, Games, Ghosts, Graeme Garden, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

1900-1949 Games

Friday Fun – Winking, 1935

Oh, look at this beauty! It’s The Home Entertainer by Sid G. Hedges, the author of my first 1930s book purchase many years ago, The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts. The chapter on self defence in that book is just the best – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/dirty-rotters/

So when I saw this I had to get it. It’s a book full of party ideas, entertaining tips and games. And I do love a vintage game (especially on a Friday). But! Incredibly, the book arrived still in the original packaging it was posted out in, in 1935. Wow, wow, wow, as my baby daughter likes saying (although she pretty much exclusively says it while looking at light fittings). The address it was posted to was number 27 1/2, which is a bit odd.

So, here’s the first Friday Fun in ages. A game called “Winking”. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to describe something as delightfully sexist, and yet that is how I find myself thinking of this.

(Nb – my friend Neil has just pointed out that the men and women swap places in this game after one round, which I completely missed. So, there we go, not sexist anyway.)

Tags 1930s, 1934, Friday fun, Games, Indoor game, Sid G Hedges, the universal book of hobbies and handicrafts

1900-1949 Ephemera Games

Happy Families, 1910

Post author By Estelle
Post date January 7, 2015

Happy Families, old-school style, is a fascinating game – mainly because of the tradition of depicting the families in Victorian caricature, all big heads and semi-human appearance. For this reason, I was equally intrigued and unnerved by the card game as a child.

For the princely sum of 99p on Ebay, I purchased this lovely Chad Valley Games pack from 1910. In pretty good condition for a pack of cards over 100 years old.

Here’s the rules:

If you’re a comedy fan like me, a fun game with Happy Families is to decide which League of Gentleman would play each role, if Happy Families was a film (please do this, Mark Gatiss).

So for example, deffo Steve Pemberton for the terrifying Mr Drug the Doctor and Mr Blonde the Barber. Reece Shearsmith for Master Groats the Grocer’s Son and Master Putty the Painter’s Son (and Mrs Putty too), and Mark Gatiss for Mrs Howler the Singer’s wife and Mr Clamp the Carpenter. You’re allowed Jeremy Dyson.

However, I am having trouble imagining anyone but Michael Palin as Mr ‘Arris the Aristocrat. This is a good pun, ‘Arris being the first part of Aristocrat and also a slang word for arse. I love the tortured way this became Cockney rhyming slang – arse was firstly “bottle and glass”, then just “bottle”, which, via a new rhyme, became “Aristotle” and then “Aris”.

Anyway, here are the families. Creepy, aren’t they? Look at the cold, dead eyes of Master Bull, the Butcher’s Son.