It's the Great Pumpkin?

We finally got around to playing "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", the one we got on our Sedona trip on Halloween.  It felt a little off playing it in February, but we love all the Peanuts characters and the original shows, and Snoopy is still a go-to winner when we buy greeting cards for each other.

Anyway, when I grabbed this, I thought it was the original for some reason.  One glance at the box should have been enough.  That swirly game board with paths crossing underneath other paths is distinctive.  This company did a similar re-issue for the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer game.  From what I remember, the original Great Pumpkin game had a fairly simple path around the board where player pick cards from the pile, and have to complete the four cards that make up one of the characters to win.  Those "four or six cards makes a bigger picture games" were not uncommon in the 1970s -- games like Colombo did the same thing.

This is just a roll-and-move game, and I know a lot of people just complain about those these days.  "There's no strategy" ... "they're too simple" ... "they're dumb."  Come on.  Just stick to the games you like, and stop telling other people they can't enjoy what they enjoy.

It's a little odd that this came with an 8-sided die, but it's just the right spread of numbers for a board of this size.  The designer did a good job of maximizing the number of spaces on the board.  The over-and-under movement was a bit annoying at first, but there are arrows on most spaces telling you where to go.  On other spaces you draw a card or swap spaces with another player.  The only other game mechanic was that if you land on another player, you have an "apple bobbing contest".  Each player rolls the die, loser goes back the difference.  The tiny rule sheet did not say so, but we figured if there's a tie you could roll again ... or just share the space for a few seconds?

It's a sort of Snakes and Ladders game where you slide up and down what the rules say are "candy poles."  I had never heard of a candy pole before.  It sounds like you would get a rash or something if you tried that in real life.  The one thing that gave this game a distinct feel was: when you do use a pole, the loopy paths of the board make it hard to know if you went forward of backward.  There were some funny moments of "how the heck did I end up in front of you again?"  Along with big jumps, where it looked like I was 10 spaces from winning, only end up behind again.

I have to give a thumbs up to the funny blurbs on the cards.  It's too easy to rush through a game like this and not even look, but we read the cards out loud and some of them were really cute, and true to the Peanuts characters.  Sure, after you've seen them all, it would get dull, but you still have the funny pictures of the Peanuts to entertain you.

The funniest rule to us is that the first two players to reach the end should have an apple bobbing contest to pick the actual winner.  Don't the people writing the rules stop and think?  In a two player game, that means it doesn't matter who got there first ... you could just skip the whole game and just roll dice to see who won!  Kinda funny, I guess.  

This was just some afternoon fun.  It got some laughs and smiles along the way.  That's what games are for.