Reviewing VCR Board Games without Playing the Board Games
Or, Desperate trend-chasing in the VHS era
Before there was Scene It? on DVD players (which is my reference point here, so that dates me a bit), companies took a number of stabs at board games which incorporated video technology into the gameplay. In the midst of a video game industry rebounding from a crash in 1983, an industry that by the 1980s was experimenting with full-motion video technology, it appears that there was some residual interest in the home video market for something that gamified VCR technology.
These video tapes were before my time, so they were a new discovery for me. My immediate thought when hearing about this clever multimedia gimmick was that it probably was significantly limited in terms of functionality. Even something like Scene It? (which is quite a janky experience if you were to try it out today) utilized a DVD player’s menu capability to create discrete instances of gameplay that used video clips. A VCR player is incapable of such menu screens. So, a VHS tape used within the context of a game would require use of the pause button, and it would only ever have the one, linear video experience.
As I found out, in many cases the VHS tape served as a narrativized timer of sorts, counting the game down while adding audiovisual flavor. Still, the re-playability of these games seemed suspect to me from the get-go. On the other hand, I suppose this is a problem that gaming companies are constantly facing.
On the other other hand, re-playability was the least of some of these board game companies’ worries. Some were clearly out to make a quick buck, cashing in on the novelty of VCR technology with entirely impractical games. Take, for instance, Paws & Play Games, which produced a line of casino gambling games that simulated the randomness of craps, slots, and roulette by rapidly simulating a few hundred iterations of the game over 15-20 minutes of tape. For craps, the tape displays a pair of dice rapidly changing in number, and the viewer pressing the “Pause” button served as a dice roll. This is what Paws & Play considers “random,” and I suppose the effect works close enough to chance that someone could feasibly simulate a craps game using this short tape.
However, one wonders why anyone would purchase an expensive VHS tape to play craps when…a pair of dice is all that is required. I can’t help but feel the company was preying on gambling addicts, because I can’t think of any other clientele who would want to purchase these tapes. (For what it’s worth, I got a kick out of the approximately 10-second long audio clip that loops for the entire 15 minutes of dice rolling on the tape. It is the only audio used during the “gameplay” portion of the video, and it is comprised of the shaking of dice, the sound of someone blowing on dice, and a man speaking “come on, baby” in an oddly hushed tone).
These Paws & Play games could hardly be considered “board games,” as the casino games involve no board to speak of, from what I can tell. However, Paws & Play did release a quasi-flight simulator game as a promotional tie-in with Red Baron pizza, in which players pause the VHS in order to “get instructions on how to proceed on the board—it’s never the same game twice!” After seeing the casino games in action, I am skeptical as to how involved this “board game” actually is. I have no access to the video tape, so I don’t know exactly what’s on it, but Board Game Geek does a nice job of illustrating what the board game portion of the game entails. It is simply a board with a series of circles indicating the flight path of the biplane and four player pieces that move along that path. Based on this, and the “random” dice rolls of the company’s craps simulator, my assumption is that “Red Baron Stearman Squadron Race” involves a VHS tape that gives you a number when you pause it, and you move your piece that number of spaces on the board. This is to say, I’m guessing these Paws & Play cheapskates just sold children a tape that functions as dice.
Many VHS board games merely simulated existing board and party games. Parker Brothers released Rich Little’s VCR Charades, in which Rich Little performs 83 charades in front of three actors. I suppose the goal here for the viewer is to guess the charade before the actors do. Or for people with no friends to be able to have a simulated two-hour party with Rich Little, in which Rich Little really tries hard to impress you with his impersonations … and you kind of do your best to humor him, but that proves to be some amount of labor … and so you try to ghost him by excusing yourself to the powder room, but he grabs you by the lapel and pulls you close … “it’s spot on, though, is it not?” he asks you, desperation cracking through in his tone … but you have absolutely no idea who the impersonator was impersonating … he cracks a wry smile … “What am I talking about? Of course it is! And what would you know anyway, pilgrim!” … it’s a John Wayne, and it’s OK, sure, but Rich is getting weird and ornery now … you say it’s getting late and you’ve gotta head out … but then you recall that this is your house … Rich is doing laps around your bedroom now, just cycling through celebrities who were famous in decades that came and went decades before you were born … why is there nobody else at this party? … how did you get here?
Some VCR board games ventured out from the cheap and the done before, experimenting with the audiovisual form to create genuinely new game experiences. Gone Birding! is something of a virtual tourism tape, as it takes players on “video trips” to various bird habitats. Players must identify the birds on the video tape while navigating around the board and pulling informational cards. While basic in terms of premise, the tape included 10 separate game sessions with included commentary from two professional birders, making it a much more reasonable purchase compared to some of the other tapes we’re looking at.
Hi-Ho Video released some children’s games featuring puppet characters that aesthetically exist halfway between Sesame Street and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. In Hi-Ho Mother Goose, the puppet Mother Goose is beamed into your home like she’s goddamn Jigsaw telling you she’d like to play a game. The VHS gamifies nursery rhymes in a strictly linear fashion, which doesn’t sound like a particularly fun game experience. If you play the game more than once, then you know the Humpty Dumpty card is coming up first. And while the cards are doled out to players randomly, I just can’t imagine it would be very fun for kids to play this tape more than once. Not to mention that the winner of the game is whoever has the Mother Goose card in their hand, a goal that really has nothing to do with what is going on on the tape. There’s a card-stealing mechanic throughout the tape, but it is mostly irrelevant to the nursery rhyme angle. Ultimately, this is mostly just a watered down version of Old Maid.
And Mother Goose’s dead-eyed stare down the barrel really does a number on the soul.
Pressman Toy Corp. made two board game tapes. Each repurposed fleetingly brief (and likely copyright free) footage from Hollywood movies that corresponded to a specific genre. Doorways to Adventure, as the title suggests, trucked in the action-adventure genre, and Doorways to Horror showed a variety of monster movie clips. These games used Pressman’s trademark “Colorscan” dice, where each dice roll corresponded to a different colored “door” on the VHS tape. Players would fast forward to whichever colored door they had rolled, with play continuing in this fashion until the tape reached its conclusion. With the tape being around an hour in length, this likely translated into a fairly short gameplay experience (not to mention, you lose the immersion a bit when you have to fast-forward through the clips you didn’t roll).
In Doorways to Horror, cheeky narrators introduce the clips (which run roughly 5-10 seconds), then present two possible ways that the monster in the clip may be bested by the player, depending on if the player has the correct spell or weapon card. Occasionally, doors would produce a “penalty” that required players to give up some of their hard-earned “gold” (the currency that wins you the game).
Most of the clips on the tape come from B-movies of the 1930s and 1950s-1960s, many of them Roger Corman productions (e.g., Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Terror), as well as multiple different clips from the film White Zombie and, of all things, a Popeye cartoon. In certain instances, the clips are straight up advertisements for films, as in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which includes audio from the film’s trailer.
Spears Games, in partnership with Village Roadshow’s home video arm, released multiple “Atmosfear” horror-themed tapes, including a series called “Nightmare.” The VHS component of Nightmare involves a robed figure called “The Gatekeeper,” who spends portions of the video barking orders at the players in a vague European accent (“answer me!”) and calling them “maggots.” If the players fail to answer The Gatekeeper in a timely manner, they may be punished with random penalties (e.g., you must roll a certain number before you can take another turn) or banished to a “black hole” on the game board.
When the man is not on-screen, a timer is, counting upwards toward the game’s end-state, which occurs after 60 minutes. As the tape progresses, the man’s appearance grows more and more ghoulish, until at the end of the tape he looks like a Spirit Halloween rendition of Emperor Palpatine.
Nightmare is the most involved gameplay of the VCR board games I looked at. The tape actually contains something of consequence to the game itself. At the same time, the same problem of re-playability comes to the fore, as the tape contains the same linear sequence of events each time it is played. The company’s attempted remedy to this was to release sequels with different ghoulish figureheads controlling the game.
Nightmare was a massive hit, selling over 100,000 units in its home country of Australia during its first year on the market. At one point, its seasonal sales surpassed that of Trivial Pursuit. According to one of the co-creators, Brett Clements, total sales for the game surpassed 3.5 million units. The game was sold by its publisher and marketers as a cultural phenomenon in Australia. A Nightmare-themed dance party was held at Australia’s Wonderland theme park on one Halloween night in the early-90s, where it reportedly drew 24,000 attendees (many of which had to be turned away; allegedly 15,000 people were in attendance). The company partnered with Pepsi to make a Nightmare tie-in “challenge” with $100,000 worth of prizes (I’m unclear what the actual “challenge” entailed). And I patently refuse to address the quasi-Michael-Jackson-ripoff tie-in song “Thrill Me,” with accompanying music video…
As far as reviewing these games without considering the board games themselves goes, Nightmare may be the most entertaining thing I’ve watched. It’s insanely basic, given it is a single camera setup turned on a guy ham-handing a performance with a direct address to camera. But his shtick is kitschy in a fun way (“the ghost train’s a-comin, kiddies…listen to it scream”), and the slow transformation of his character is something of visual interest (most of these tapes have little in the way of interesting visuals).
The only thing I watched that is superior to Nightmare is Isaac Asimov’s Robots. A product of Kodak, of all things, Robots is a legitimate narrative movie with real production value behind it. At the tape’s onset, we are told that a crime has been committed, and it is up to the players to pick up on the clues and solve the crime.
As the story of the Asimov adaptation plays out on the tape, players are occasionally asked to pause the tape and pick from a deck of cards, which provide relevant information to solving the crime.
The board game box claims that there are 256 different permutations that the game can take, and that one can play the game “hundreds of times and may never play exactly the same game twice.” I’m not entirely clear how that math works out, given the linearity of the tape—the murder mystery on the tape is the same every time (it is a loose adaptation of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel). My guess is that it has something to do with the different ways that the cards can get doled out over the course of the game, but the actual mystery to be solved has a singular answer. So the 256 different games to be played still only has one correct way to play. At least, this is what I presume, unless the board game has a Clue aspect to it, where the assailant could end up being multiple people. The problem is, the tape on its own does not provide a resolution to the story.
Still, the tape is sound from a filmmaking perspective. However low budget it may be, it is leaps and bounds ahead of these other VCR games. The video has a full cast, various visual effects, and an entire story based on Asimov’s work. And while some claimed Nightmare to be the “first” VCR game (in 1991), Robots beat it to market by three years.
There are many, many more of these VCR board games. Frankly, they are less exciting than I thought they might be, but the few that actually try to create a unique gaming experience are worthy of being remembered as the cultural curios that they are. Then again, this may be the equivalent of someone 30 years from now doing a “deep dive” on Nintendo Labo or something like that … a useless exercise in complete futility.