Roger’s Roundup
Occasionally there comes along a board game that incorporates an electronic element. I think the first I ever heard of was called Dark Tower, a fantasy-based game played on a circular board with a black cylindrical tower in the center. I don’t know a lot about it, I never played Dark Tower.
I’m sure there were others that predated it. It’s just the first one I heard of.
The first board game with electronics I played was called Stop Thief.
Do y’all remember that game?
The board represented a map of a 4-block city, divided into a grid of squares. You could see floor plans of the buildings, doors, windows and the streets outside.
To play, you selected a thief card, showing a bad guy or gal, their humorous name and crime, and, most importantly, the reward for their capture. Many of the spaces on the board were marked with a three-digit number.
The electronic gadget looked like a big cellphone. You hit a button on the device, and it kicked out a sound representing the thief’s movement from one numbered square to the next. For instance you might hear the “bloop-bloop-bloop” sound of the thief walking across a floor, the electronic trilling tinkle of a broken window or the fast “bipbipbipbipbip” of the scoundrel running down the road. The challenging part: The thief is never represented by a piece on the board. You have to use the sounds to track down an invisible thief.
When you thought you knew where the culprit was, you moved your pawn to the location and tried to make an arrest by typing the number into the device. This led to one of three outcomes.
First, you might be in the wrong place. Of course, this might mean the thief is 10 feet away down the road at the next number. Or, you might successfully have tracked the bad guy and slap the handcuffs on. Collect your reward.
The most interesting thing that could happen was neither of these. Oh, no.
Sometimes you could have located the pilferer, gone in for the arrest and the suspect flew the coop. Suddenly instead of the disappointed boops of a miss or the triumphant fanfare of an arrest, you are assaulted with a barrage of movement sounds — bloop-bloop-bloop, bloop-bloop-bloop, tinkle, bipbipbipbipbip, bipbipbipbipbip, sqeeeeak of a door opening — as the culprit eludes you. You have to listen quickly and try to trace the new location as they get away.
Stop Thief came out in 1979, and I probably had it in the early ‘80s, making me 11 or 12 years old at the time.
A similar but non-electronic game I got fairly recently is called Fury of Dracula. In it, one player plays the granddaddy vampire, taking a tour of Europe. Other players are vampire hunters. Dracula moves from city to city on a European map. Each time he moves to a new city, he places a card face down with that city’s name at the end of a row representing his path. When a vampire hunter moves to a city in the path, Dracula turns that card face-up. Hunters can then use that info to track the monster.
It’s a fun, more grown-up challenge than Stop Thief, with a lot of extra elements, like the effects of daytime and nighttime and combat against a deadly foe.
I no longer have Stop Thief, but I’d gladly play a game of Fury of Dracula some weekend.
Roger Cline is a staff writer for The Snyder News. Comments on his article can be made at roger@thesnydernews.com