Spiel de Jahres Home Games

[Jeremy Nelson]

On the official home game thread here, I learned that Just One, a board game that shares its format with the pilot to Oddball, won the Spiel de Jahres, a highly coveted board game award.

That being said, are there any game show home games you think would get more coverage if they weren’t attached to game shows? Meaning- if the show never existed and the game got released (i.e. Wheel of Fortune never gets on tv, and years later someone releases a game with the same rules called “Hangman Roulette”), do you think it’d sell more copies/get more buzz, etc?

[SuperMatch93]

TV Scrabble might have made for a popular board game if it wasn't released under that header.

[DoorNumberFour]

Blockbusters for sure. If the trivia boom of the 80s has taken hold of Hex...

[Neumms]

Password. Best home game ever, and communicate-to-your-partner(s) games are in vogue.

How about Tic-Tac-Dough? Few trivia games are designed for two players. The 50s version's plastic board with Automatic Category Selector is way cool. I don't know if the Spiel de Jahres people are into gambling, but it's ideal for friendly wagering, kind of like Backgammon.

Blockbusters for sure. If the trivia boom of the 80s has taken hold of Hex...

Hard to do jump-ins in box games. It'd be outstanding on an iPad app, though.

[TLEberle]

Shenanigans; Win, Lose or Draw.

[BrandonFG]

I always thought GO would make for a great party game or office team building exercise. I’d also add Chain Reaction and Hot Potato.

[Matt Ottinger]

Getting all historical (hey, I'm allowed), It Takes Two is an interesting case.  Fun game, easy to understand, and perfect for party situations.  And the interesting part is that when the box game came out, it really wasn't marketed as a TV game.  It was part of a bookshelf series that was a joint project between NBC and Hasbro, but despite the fact that the NBC peacock appears on the entire line of games, most of them had no connection to a TV game show at all. Nothing about the It Takes Two box says anything about "as played on TV".

[TLEberle]

Happily, the "who is closest to the answer of this wacky question?" is basically the through line of Wits and Wagers.

/and it's tons of fun.
//the raw game of Go/Instant Reaction exists in board game form as Bialogue, Inspeaquence and Talkin' Tango. You can also use the word cards from Hollywood Game night or the disks from Catch Phrase.

[Matt Ottinger]

Happily, the "who is closest to the answer of this wacky question?" is basically the through line of Wits and Wagers.

Along those same lines, you could have a grand time playing Talk About without knowing it was a TV game show.  You would call it Outburst, of course...

[calliaume]

How about Tic-Tac-Dough? Few trivia games are designed for two players. The 50s version's plastic board with Automatic Category Selector is way cool. I don't know if the Spiel de Jahres people are into gambling, but it's ideal for friendly wagering, kind of like Backgammon.

Slightly off topic, but I discovered in my youth that the 1950s version of Tic Tac Dough could even be played solo. I bought a copy around 1976 or so, and no one I knew was interested in playing (they thought it was supposed to be Hollywood Squares). But all those questions had answers at the bottom and fit nicely in the question holder - all you had to do was cover the answer with your thumb when pulling the question out of the holder. Definitely one of my favorite home games, and I'm sorry I let my mother get rid of it in a fit of cleaning while I was in college.

[Matt Ottinger]

Definitely one of my favorite home games, and I'm sorry I let my mother get rid of it in a fit of cleaning while I was in college.

Twenty maybe twenty-five bucks and you could have one again.  Losing my original board games when I went away to college (in my case, due to a small fire in a storage building) is what inspired my deciding to collect.  And that was WAY before Ebay made it easy.

[Neumms]

Slightly off topic, but I discovered in my youth that the 1950s version of Tic Tac Dough could even be played solo.

How did you handle the always-intriguing strategy element? Did you augment the box game with a Merlin?

[Neumms]

Two more old games...

Eye Guess, especially for kids. They'd get a big kick out of the mismatches.

Who What or Where would be fun. Great game, doesn't need lock-out buttons and since only one player answers each question, you could easily design it to work without an emcee.

Slightly off-topic but I've always wondered...Anyone know the reason Ron G. titled it The Who What or Where Game rather than simply Who What or Where?