When I was a kid back in the 1970’s (please no jokes about how old I am- I’m well aware), there wasn’t the Internet to scare our parents and waste our time, cell phones were a distant reality, and I actually spent my time with good, ole family fun, as most of us did. We still drank water from the tap (and sometimes from the hose), knew our neighbors well enough to do more than just borrow eggs, and never had an organic piece of food cross our lips.

Star Wars was all we talked about, Farrah Fawcett was on the wall of 56% of teen-aged boys bed rooms, and when we weren’t playing Frogger on our Nintendos or Intellivisions, we played board games for fun.

Hungry, Hungry Hippo was quite possibly one of the best games ever. What can beat a bunch of plastic hippos fighting over marbles as an educational tool for Darwinism to show how only the best and survive? I remember making my little brother cry on more than one occasion with this one, just like I did when I ate all the pizza at our rare family outings....

While technically not a board game, Simon was sheerly awesome. The purpose of the game was to re-create the music of the master-musician Simon and to follow the blinking lights. I would love to get my hands on this game again and as a non-musician, believe that I could make it big with the skills learned from this game. 

While not everyone is a fan of the rat-race, everybody loves getting money, especially kids. This precursor to The Apprentice is kind of like the Life, kind of like the game Monopoly, but doesn't take four hours to play.

Everybody knows Monopoly, but kids today have no idea that there used to be only one version of the game; it didn't used to have a Corvette edition or local versions all over the country- it was always Park Place and Boardwalk unless you were too poor to buy them.

Life was probably the coolest game of all, mostly because you got to drive a convertible around with your wife or husband and little pink and blue children. This was before we got so gender-correct, and times were simpler then, but still tough as you were forced to make take life's hits as they came.