A SHORTHISTORY OF FORTEAN BOARDGAMES
It’s sometimes said that playing with supernatural forces “is not a game”. Yet in millions of homes around the world, family game night has mixed laughs and friendly competition with a delve into the weird and unexplained. Whether it’s contacting dead relatives via Séance (1972), sticking pins into a plastic Voodoo dolls with Mystic Skull (1964) or honing our spooky sixth sense with Uri Geller’s Strike (1986), games companies have long known that the world of strange phenomena is not just a source of fascination, but of fun. So, pull up a chair, pick your playing piece and get rolling… as we breeze through a selection of some of the kookiest (and most collectable) vintage fortean board games.
THE ALIENS ARE COMING
ETs have long hovered over the board game landscape, and back in the late 1940s they were even helping kids learn through play. The Sound Spelling Company tapped into the alien life idealism of the age by releasing The Flying Saucer Spelling Game. With its saucer-themed circular board and alien ‘World’s Fair’ artwork, the game saw players turn the rotating inner circle to create as many words as possible. At 49 cents, the cover claimed it was “The World’s First PAINLESS speller for Kids from 5 to 90”.
More generally, space-themed board games continued into the 1950s and 1960s, from the Earth-to-Saturn space race game Astron in 1954 (with its scrolling game board) to games inspired by TV shows like Lost in Space (1965) or Star Trek (1967).1 The UFOs were back in 1968 when Funland released the strategy game Flying Saucers. Players command a squadron of 12 saucers (plastic discs) travelling across space (a low-fi board filled with coloured circles) while avoiding enemy spaceships. The 1968 Catalogue of Copyright Entries lists it as “An Exciting New Space Age Game”.
In 1970, Century 21 Merchandising Ltd released UFO Red Alert, based on the Gerry Anderson series UFO. Players shoot down flying saucers before they reach Earth (the hit video game Space Invaders would reach arcades just eight years later with the same premise). The tri-fold game board and pieces came in a soft, black plastic folder, designed to look like it held top-secret flight plans. The game was available via a mail away offer, with tokens from Quaker Oats packets.2
In 1978, Parker Brothers released the official Close Encounters of the Third Kind game. Similar to Battleship, this game of “concentration and chance” involves players moving their simple pieces across a solemn looking number grid, set against the movie image of UFOs hovering at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. “It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s unusual,” shouted the box. That same year Avalon Hill released UFO: Game of Close Encounters with a similarly serious-looking grid-board (a running theme with UFO board games). Here players must deploy satellites to identify the “mysterious lights approaching from space… Will you waste your time looking for weather balloons and meteors while the Alien flying saucers slip past?” It also offers the chance to play as the aliens, hiding your craft “among the strange lights in the heavens”; or if you wish, you can flat out invade Earth. The game was originally called UFO until Avalon redesigned it to cash in on the movie release. It was one of those rare occasions a company could do so without fear of a trademark dispute from a Hollywood studio, since terms like “UFO” and “Close Encounters” were pre-existing classifications.
The aliens kept on coming in 1979 when Waddingtons released (aka ). Players attempt to land their alien craft on Earth. Unique features include a mask that prevents players from seeing one another’s moves and a battery-powered flying saucer that bleeps to indicate its, a dice roll, grid movement game depicting an alien invasion in 1983. In the actual year 1980, players could experience HG Wells’s invasion classic , with a map-based strategy game of the same name – presumably while listening to Jeff Wayne’s epic musical adaptation, which had only been released two years earlier.
