and these we also loved

and this where you had to avoid being "Hodged"

Did you ever finish a game of Colditz? We liked the game but it took ages and one person was always sort of not joining in because they were German.
My favourites were Scoop! and AirCharter, both Waddingtons of course.

I still have that - on a shelf, never to be played again because it took forever because whoever was the German could just call roll-call and then all plans were burst ...

I remember how disappointing the Battle Of The Little Bighorn was, too.

You had to make a break using the car or hope you had the four-leaf clover card. We played if one escaped the were the winner. we used to sometimes play all day. great fun whilst listening to The Dame and Slade in Flame and the Tighten Up series.
never played Scoop. we once tried Totopoly but it was so complicated.

we would travel the seven seas laden down with booty (and we only thought it meant gold n jewels then)

never finished a game just got bored.
Outside classics monopoly and risk we had one where you flew airfreight round the pacific which was diverting. We also had the London game which which sent to collect souvenirs from such exotic destination like "potters bar" and "Putney". There is then the love that dare not speak it's name D & D......

But Dungeons and Dragons, however..

That's probably a whole new thread.

Up The Ladder consisted of a miniature A-frame ladder with tilting steps. Everyone started with four plastic men, each representing a different archaic profession (Miller, Coalman etc). The men all carried different coloured sacks on their backs which had the effect of upsetting their centre of gravity. The goal was to get all four to the top of the ladder before your opponents.

Players took it in turns to roll a die and then move their pieces. You could concentrate on getting one man to the top, or you could bring several into play and alternate between them.

Unfortunately having three men on the same step would cause it to tilt sending the occupants tumbling back down the ladder, often knocking aside any pieces on lower rungs.

This frequently resulted in appalling runs of bad luck as, once more, a random chain of events completely beyond your control sent your Grocer tumbling to the bottom of the ladder where, assuming that you hadn’t stormed out of the room in a tantrum, he would have to resume his climb the following turn. In hindsight this game accurately predicted the course of my adult life.

My favourite board game is Polarity. The goal here is to balance magnetic discs off the magnetic fields of other counters so that they are effectively leaning on their sides at steep angles, held up by an invisible force. The game becomes more complex as the playing area fills up and you have to take into account competing magnetic fields. It’s difficult to explain but below is a short video of my brother and I playing it.

Remember playing it whilst completely rat-arsed and only finding out after hours of fruitless but amusing play that we'd neglected to put any cards into the little envelope.So remember Kids don't smoke Grass it makes you lose your mem....Oh!whatsit,you know Thingy.

took weeks to play, but was actually decided in the initial division of land in the first five minutes. From then on in was a long struggle against superior forces hell-bent on world domination, played out seemingly in real time. You'd end up under siege in Australia, finally ending your days in New Zealand.

It did teach us where Kamchatka is, though.

COLDITZ - a classic, admittedly dull for the first half-hour (especially for The German) while everyone's collecting escape equipment, but I don't have the bad memories of unfinished games everyone else here seems to have, I save those for...

RISK! - the game for which the phrase "War Of Attrition" might have been invented, still played it for days on end tough, and who remembers the Spizz(les) song about it?

MOUSE TRAP and HAUNTED HOUSE - both combinations of board game and structural engineering, MT is the classic of course, but HH had "Drop the Whammy Ball down the chimney"... I saw a new version of MT a year or two ago BTW, a shadow of its former self...

One I discovered as an adult is RAILWAY RIVALS - devilishly simple in concept, you use felt pens on a wipeclean board to trace your railroad across various terrains and carry cargo to and from assigned destinations. Sounds dull, but trust me, it brings out the competitive streak in everyone, you will lose friends playing it...

Was I the only person to own one of these?

It was a horse-racing game. You had a linen cloth stretched over a tablecloth, with a plastic box thing at one end. You positioned the six metal horses at one end and turned the handle on the box. It gave the cloth sharp little tugs, propelling the different coloured horses up the track, through various barriers, until one of them crossed the finishing line. Commentating was enormous fun. The game was ... well, you basically bet on the horses, and that was it.
At our house, the yellow horse never won because its leg was all wonky. The horses were covered in lead paint, which probably made them ultra-poisonous. Not that we cared in those days, of course...

until you try to play a game called "Diplomacy". The rule book was thicker than the King James Bible and THERE WERE NO DICE. Set in Europe pre WW1, oh fuck it I'm drifting off already... needless to say you're not very "diplomatic" when you're 13 years old. As for "Colditz" anyone who says it's boring didn't change the rules enough. We agreed that I as the Germans could use my "Shoot to kill" card 20 times in a game, so I would call everyone into the courtyard and execute someone, mainly Dutch prisoners I recall, just for laughs. These games would end up in a punch-up between me and my mates almost every time we played. Suck on that Nintendo DS!

Surprisingly gripping

The best football game ever...a dice game basically but covered (i think) the old first division (a whole league season), FA Cup and European Cup.
All teams started off equal but an unlucky roll meant you had to use a dice with lower scores.
I`m not doing it justice but it was just great and I couldn`t believe how often Ipswich won the league...and Borussia Monchengladbach the European Cup.

Apparently called the less inspiring Stratego now but this provided hours of military shenanigans. Also good and very similar was its cousin, Dover Patrol.

Stratego was great!!! You needed to look after those Miners though.

I also remember Totopoly (horse racing) and Journey Through Europe.

In the 80s me and my sister had a very non-PC game bought for us called Miss World which featured little doll playing pieces with sashes and tiaras, and you moved round the board trying to avoid such disasters as "Broke a heel, miss a turn" and "Limo fails to turn up, go back 3 spaces". The winner got to wedge their doll onto a little podium and put a big crown on their head.

Can't imagine that being popular now. Apart from the lack of understanding of the concept of Miss World by today's little girls, the board would have to say things like "Failed to get reality TV show, miss a turn" or "Dumped by 50 Cent, go back 3 spaces" or "Cocaine-taking expose in the News of the World, lose game".

using a skool pencil?

Dots on each facet of the pencil represent number of runs + 'OWZAT!'. You rolled the pencil down your desk to score runs and, if you got the 'Owzat' facet you rolled a second pencil marked with 'Caught', 'Bowled', 'LBW', 'Not Out', 'No Ball' etc.

EDIT: Of course, the posh kids had these: http://www.dicecollector.com/METAL_STEEL_D6_22_OWZTHAT_01.jpg

for whiling away the hours whilst its p*****g down (traditional British summer?).
The older you get, the more competitive it becomes.
See also: Buckaroo, Crossfire, Table Football & Jenga

Due to our internet regime here at the office I can't illustrate this but google it, it's great.

Some truths about this game, as far as my family goes anyway:
1 Someone says "We haven't played Monopoly for ages"
2 There's a dispute about the official rules vs. different people's personalised version of the rules (e.g. What happens if you land on free parking? What happens when someone doesn't want to buy the property they land on? Can you collect rent when in jail?)
then either
3 The game is abandoned due to bad feeling between someone who's doing well and everyone else
OR
4 Bored, everyone agrees to take a break, and it sits there for a couple of weeks before someone clears it away and nobody protests
5 Everyone remembers why we haven't played Monopoly for ages
6 Wait 6 months
7 Goto 1.