New arrivals and side notes

I got a batch of three old board games on eBay last week, and they showed up on my doorstep today in a nice chunky box.  I have no idea why the seller put these items together, as they are different themes from different decades, but here they are: The Six-Million Dollar Man, Masterpiece and the 1954 version of Pirate and Traveller (which I have been wanting to see for a while).  Unboxing, they were all in top condition and all the parts were there except Masterpiece was missing the value cards, but I could hop over to BGG to find a list of those and print them myself.

First Looks:

Masterpiece was the way I remembered it: an oversized board with paintings with values attached to them to buy or auction.  I'm not sure why it even needed the board.  A little deck of cards with those same phrases would do just as well.  I didn't see if there was a rule for landing on another player's piece.  If so, and that's the only reason there's a board, and the big board is the only reason there's the big box ... that's silly.

Six-Million Dollar Man had the opposite problem: there is no reason it needed that deck of cards.  I was expecting them to have some kind of mission information on them, but every one of them is just "Power".  So you can spend power to move or roll dice to move.  Interesting that the board is split into four missions, which are effectively smaller game boards.  The overall story is hilarious: that there are impostors and the winner somehow "proves" they are the real guy.  It looks like it provide some enjoyable basic roll-and-move sessions.

I have been looking at different editions of Pirate and Traveller online but while the 1950s to 1970s editions are reasonably common, none of the older ones (1911, 1936) were selling at decent prices.  This time, the game and cards are both indispensible.  You pick destination cards and spin to move to get there.  The spinner is not just 1 to 6, it has values like 10, 15 and 20 to speed you along.  There are plenty of hazard spaces, but mostly you get to the city on your card, save any unspent movement, draw your next card, and keep moving.  The first player to complete a 10th card is supposed to call out "Pirates All", then all players turn into pirates and the final goal is to take all your cards to the secret pirate base in Greenland.  There are other rules, of course, but those are the basics.  It sounds like fun.  Still pretty simple by modern game standard, but finding the towns on the map and getting there safely is a good time.  Much more interesting, but I guess it's just a race game in the end.  With a map, a spinner, and cards saying where to go, I'm not sure what else I thought it would be.

Side topic: the funny thing about game spinners is that they were added to games to avoid giving dice to kids.  So many board games do have a 1-to-6 spinner, which is pretty hilarious to me.  If you're going to print a custom thing just to avoid dice, you might as well get creative with it.  Why not go up to 7 or 9, or some non-sequential selection of numbers?  Some have gone with colors instead of numbers.  I have seen a lot of game rules from the 1900s to 1950s which say to use a "teetotum", which today is a very obscure thing; but it was just a spinnable thing, like a top or dreidel, or even just a disk with a pencil poked through it.  Anything to keep dice out of the hands of young players, to keep the game "wholesome" and not a gateway to gambling.  Really.  Like the kids who wanted dice didn't already have dice from other games?

Side topic: Boy, the online market for replacement pieces for games has gotten crazy.  Just a few cardboard pieces from a game from the 1970s might be selling for $7 plus $3 shipping.  I don't know that these are actually selling, but those are the kinds of wacky prices people are making up.  When I was still on eBay (20 years selling stamps) I thought about adding this as a new category, but the last thing I needed were a few hundred more $5 lots that might sit there for years before finally selling.  Back to those Masterpiece value cards, would I reasonably be expected to go to some third party and pay $5 or $8 for them, when they can be printed on cardstock?  It's the card decks which are the main challenge when trying to recapture most games, but these just have dollar amounts.