It's a piece I wrote for Pilchard Teeth in early 2002.

MERELY PLAYERS

I planned to take copious notes when I met up to play with Will Macdonald. Author of 'How To be a Pub Genius' and one of the brains behind early 90s gameshow masterpiece Don't Forget Your Toothbrush (admit it: you loved the bit when everyone at home turned their lights on and off), he is also one the best known collectors of board games. Best known to me, at least.
As I said, I planned to take notes, but what we embarked upon was an evening of fun, and when you're in the middle of such enormous leisure, it's hard to maintain the distant objectivity on which conventional journalism depends. In that sense it's much like war, its diametric opposite, where the first casualty is truth. In fun, truth is the first piece you lose down the back of the sofa.

Will greeted me, Julia the brilliant photographer whose work you see all round here, and her assistant Sebastian with tea and cakes. And then dived straight into a chest where he keeps all his games. And out came Subbuteo Rugby, out came Ulcers, out came something called Stork Bingo (which we never got around to playing and so thus remains a mystery).

"A lot of these are from my own childhood," Will admitted, and you could make out his name, or that of a brother, ballpoint penned forcefully on the game's lid, much as if they were the marks of farmers on the rumps of sheep. "But this. . . this. . . I bought recently."

This. . . this. . . was what I'd mainly come to see. And to play. This. . . this. . . was Cascade, by Matchbox.

(Just a little interruption. Isn't it great that you have to give the name of the game then a comma and then its maker. In this, games are like perfumes but instead of Flowers, by Yardley or Memories, by Lentheric, you have Ideal and Milton Bradley. Well I think it's great.)

Cascade involves a set-up that's complicated to describe but simple to enjoy. Small ball bearings (the right size for sticking up a smaller brother's nostrils) go to the top of a tower on an electric backwards helter skelter, a skelter helter, if you will. Then with the aid of a ramp and gravity they fall and hit an orange rubber drum. This bounces them six inches towards the next drum and then on to another before they arrive in a table goal type thing where points are scored. The balls are then sent down a chute the length of the track, to the bottom of the tower where the process begins again. It's an executive toy designed by a six year old and it's totally addictive.

Will's pride was clear. "Cascade was what I always wanted. It was the centrepiece of the Harrods toy department and it was set up there for you to play in the store. It was the first thing you saw as you came in and I'd always ask my Mum if we could have it. But I never got it as a kid." Now he does though, and he loves it more because he fought for it. "It took four or five goes to win it in an auction on Ebay," he smiles. At least I think that's what he said, I was concentrating on the hypnotic fun of Cascade.

Ebay dot com is currently the best place to look for your lost childhood. It gets attention every now and then for its dumb auctions - human kidneys, F117a Nighthawk stealth fighters and pure cocaine have all been offered. My favourite recent one was when a seller took bids last Autumn offering 'I will kick your ass': "If you win this auction. . . I will just fly in, kick your ass, and then leave." The price only went up to $1.75 before the site took the auction down. But there's so many good things to be got there week in, week out - second hand books, movies, old records. And board games.

"The first game I bought on Ebay I ended up giving away. It sounded so promising. It was called "Swing Swang" and the picture made it look like a lot of fun, but when I received it and started playing it, it was just about getting a ball into a plastic cup." Where was the fun in that? "Exactly." I didn't ask Will who he disliked enough to be the unfortunate recipient of Swing Swang.

Will showed me another of his online purchases. "Tie 'n tangle," whose box declares it to be "the most hilarious. . . knottiest. . . fun game for the family" and on the box we can see a family being hilarious and knotty. It's a sort of Twister with the third dimension being involved - you stand up and send the coloured strings over and under legs and arms until you end up in a human mash. It's kind of like shunting from that movie 'Society'?

Huh, I think. There are people I'd like to play such a game with and they don't include my family. But the box is a work of art. "Most of the time, the games aren't great," Will admits, " but the picture on the box is priceless." He shows me his family's old copy of Totopoly, the horse racing game and its lid looks like it should be framed. "They don't make them like that anymore," we both say.

We played on. Next we hit the Mastermind. Not the quiz show, rather the mind game which involves coloured pegs and more thinking than I remembered it involving when I was younger. The box for this game is a classic too - a beautiful oriental woman is draped across the shoulders of a guy, a Mastermind, who's clearly just broken the bank at Monte Carlo for guessing the right sequence of coloured pegs. Such a millionaire lifestyle is what the game promises but doesn't really deliver. Will played well, deducing the right combination in two rows fewer than me despite my attempts to distract him. I suggested that one could go to a fancy dress party as The Mastermind with different coloured socks, pants and vest and give away little tokens to people who got close to guessing the right combination.

There was a de-luxe version of Mastermind too, which just involved an extra couple of peg holes and colours (and therefore squillions more possible sequences). De-luxe is a word that's virtually left our culture now, but it used to carry a great weight. Things that were de-luxe were better, more impressive. "But usually it just meant bigger and not necessarily better." Will recalled his encounter with de-luxe gaming with an air of disappointment: "The deluxe Scrabble just had a bigger velvet bag for the letters and a beeping timer that you couldn't switch off. Our timer beeped away in the games cupboard, ignored by us all until one day it finally died."

As well as de-luxe editions, most games would (and still do) come in 'travel versions' so you could take your arguments and fights on long car journeys too. "The tininess of the pieces though would cause problems. You feel like Lennox Lewis when you use the counters sometimes - Hands! Too big!!" But some games surprisingly never made it to this edition - we're still waiting for Travel Mousetrap and Travel Twister.

At this point, let me say why I've continued to love board games throughout my life. I was a member of the mid 90s board game night-club experience, the Double Six. You'd arrive, be seduced by easy listening classics (this was when it was cool to listen to these songs, the second time around) and pick up a menu. But instead of food, the menu featured board games with short descriptions about how your fun will be prepared this evening.

Mike Leigh, the Mastermind behind the club (I never told him that socks and pants idea - darn!) told me that board game companies would come and watch the club's patrons playing the games. "This was exactly the market that the companies wanted to tap into; people with disposable income who wanted to play the games of their youth and discover new ones too."

"We were given things like Loopin' Louie," Mike recalls, "Where a pilot flew his plane over the roofs of barns and you had to stop him from knocking your hens off. Our members loved that."

Talking of roofs, Will has his eye on something else online. "I've bid a couple of times for 'Hey Pa, There's a Goat on The Roof!'" What's that about I ask him. He's not entirely sure, but he imagines it involves goats and roofs. And a Pa. "Again, I just like the look of the box." Right. This man will always have a constant companion in Hope.

WHAT WILL WANTS. Hey Pa! Can you buy me this game?

But is there anything Will still particularly covets? Anything that can match the excitement of his Cascade acquisition?
"What I'm still looking for is Flight Deck. The one where you had to land a Harrier jump jet on a string? If anyone has one of those to sell, please Ebay it now! Also Haunted House. But that goes for about $300."

Mike confirms that. "Haunted House was the Holy Grail for the Double Six Club. It was like a 3-D Mousetrap style game that took a while to construct before you could play it. It had luminous pieces and rooms where spooks would randomly pop out. We tried for ages to get one, but with no luck."

Will and I finished our games and I left Will putting all his games back in his box, neatly, tidily, like a grown up does. You can't go back to your childhood, but you can play at it every now and then.

And that's a good enough game for me.

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