From the occasional EBay visits, it appears many of the English tv-based board games (quiz games, comedies and dramas) of the 50s were very cheaply made. Many had the game boards printed on the internal box support platforms, and they were very miserly with parts - tiny plastic markers and dice, small batches of play money, not many questions, cardboard game cards. The ones I grabbed to double check - Chad Valley Concentration, Bell's Take Your Pick and Double Your Money, and Merit's Ask Me Another all pretty much follow the chintzy road. Others I've seen - Bell's Spot The Tune has a small record and platform scoreboards, and even the Bell's Dotto has only 24 puzzles, 15 question categories and only 24 questions per category - so the fact that Chad Valley put so little effort into Concentration is not a surprise. But it also makes me wonder if they were on to something I've long suspected - perhaps there is more to their plan than just cheapness. I look at my game collection, and - with only a couple of exceptions, so many of them are ones I still have lots of virgin territory in - in other words, ---I'll pull a figure out of the air --- let's pretend an MB Family Feud has 75 complete games in each edition. Have I played it more than 10 times? Probably not. Most of us are above-average tv game show board game players. Perhaps the Brits knew that most people would rather watch the quizzes than play them, so they put in just enough material to play it several times before the game lost it's fascination and it wound up being consigned to the bottom of the closet or the attic. And most families that get US home games probably do the same. If it's all the same, if it would save $5 or so, I could get by on 25% less question material. Any thoughts? -
Oh, and let me clarify a point - I'm not saying most of our games have to be made any cheaper prop-wise - it's just that I can see us enjoying a Feud game with 45 complete games as much as we would 75 games. Heck, when sales merit it, we always get new editions if we're going to play them that much.