When it rained

In Africa my parents bought a number of board games to keep us kids amused and instructed--the rainy season was about half the year. The latter game never caught anybody's fancy, though Equations was frequently played, with an adjustment to the rules about challenges.

One year they brought home Coup d'etat by Hasbro. The title was pleasingly edgy, but the complicated game play had no particular bearing on the game conceit, and I'm not sure we ever finished a game.

Tactics 2 was a wargame--one of the first modern ones--and it took so long to play that it only got exercised three times. I wasn't old enough to appreciate it, I suppose, and when I was old enough, nobody else was interested. The Technical Advisory Staff included names my father knew from WWII, but meant nothing to me.

Some of us liked trivia games--not I. Especially when somebody else had played often enough to have memorized all the cards.

Monopoly got used a lot, and chess. Somebody's family got Gettysburg, but we looked at the complicated rules and noped. 3M got into games, selling bookshelf games in shelvable boxes. Twixt was good; Stocks and Bonds had a bug in the playing odds that we found quickly.

I remember playing baseball with 5 players total, and trying to make touch football work with a 7-year span of ages, but not in the rain, and there was a lot of rain. (And static-y TV only from 17:30 to 22:30) Books and board games... and homework, but that usually didn't take too long.