The Honeymooners Game? (1986)

Yes, there is a game celebrating the old Honeymooners TV show with Ralph & Alice, Norton & Trixie.  Reading the back cover description on an eBay listing, it sounded kooky and different, so I went for it.  A few days later, there it was.

One little note: the pieces and cards were still sealed in plastic bags, and the game pieces (all different colors of Ralph) were oddly greasy or slimy, even after a quick rinse.  Whatever plastic they used did not age well, so we used dice as our pawns, like so many other times.

It's a roll and move game where you have to visit all 4 corners of the board to get a bonus card from each of those piles.  Nothing fancy there.  What sounded like fun was how the main flow of the game was driven by character lines and punch lines.

If you land on a space that says "Ralph's line" or any other character's line, play one of those cards if you have it.  Read it out loud, of course.  For each of those, there a matching punch line card.  Match those by color and number, so the answer to Ralph's red 8 would be the red 8 punch line card from some other character.  If you have the punch line to your own card, play it (read the punch line out loud) and you get to go again.  Otherwise, players starting on your left all have a chance to play the punch line card, stealing the turn from you.  If you have no matching line card, again, starting on your left, all other players get a chance to play the line card for the character given and whoever has the punch line goes next.

That part was confusing until about halfway through the games, when it just clicked.  We started off with almost no punch lines at all.  I even put a few punch line cards face up on the table to help move it along.  Later, we had mostly punch lines, which are useless without the gag line.  One or two of the lines were so memorable, I knew the punchline from the show ... which I haven't seen since college.  But in the end there are only about 30 gags, and we started getting the same joke over and over.

There are a few more rules.  Nothing fancy.  To win, you have to get all four bonus cards then sneak into the apartment through what they call the bedroom door (but there is no bed in the place), and draw an Apartment card.  If the card says, "Baby, you're the greatest," then you win.  You probably remember how many shows ended with that line.  If you don't get that card, you're supposed to walk right out the front door and do another lap around.  Good thing I got the baby card.  It was already running long.

It's cute and quirky, with some classic comedy comebacks.  What blew my mind was that this game was released by ... TSR?  Yes, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons.  The same TSR whose game books I have been buying since I was 12, who I even once sent the manuscript for a D&D module of my own.  How/why on earth did they put out The Honeymooners Game?

Weird.  This felt like it would be more fun with more players.  We couldn't tell if the turn-stealing even affected the two player game, though a few times we did get to take an extra turn.  It would probably just sound like a bunch of crazy people talking for players who never saw the show.