Benji game (1979)

I bought this game for Anne because of the cute & famous dog.  It's clearly another Game of the Goose (see my blog post on those) variant where you race to the center of a round board with 64 spaces, with some spaces to send you forward or back.  In the older Goose games, the effects of the special spaces would all be listed on the game board in little tiny text.  It is so much better to draw cards when landing on these, like the Benji game does.  The obvious benefit is that you get different results each time you play.

We found a gap in the rules within the first few minutes.  The rules say that when you land on the angry dog you go back to the start, and when you land on "any other picture" space, draw a card.  It feels like they meant "any other photo", because there are other pictures -- bone, heart and food -- which just feel different, and the way they clump up near the end of the track makes drawing cards too chaotic.  Those other picture spaces feel like destinations, as they are named on the cards that send you there.  Also, we had this funny moment when I was on the bone at 14 and drew the card to "Go to the Bone at space 14."

The second gap was more of a personal preference, since the rules say that when you land on "any picture space" you draw the card and go to the space the card says, and then stop.  But that was often another picture space, and the chain reaction of those was pretty comical.  Sometimes we'd hit a chain of 4 or 5 of those and bounce all over.  

What we decided on was that you draw a card on any PHOTO space, but not on those picture spaces with drawings of things, and yes, if you land on another photo space, draw another card and bounce around.  That was fun.

Other than that, there's not much to say about, except for one trivia question: what was the name of the dog that was Benji's "girlfriend" in this show?  One card holds the answer.