Marbles

Glass marbles were made during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Workers in many glass factories made marbles for their own children. The Venetian swirl type, with ribbons of colored glass in a clear marble, and End of Day glass marbles, with flecks of colored glass in them, are most desirable. An Indian swirl marble sold […]

Favorite Vintage Games

Generations of children and adults have played these popular games: Monopoly (1936) Candyland (1949) Clue (1949) Scrabble (1949) Wiffle Ball (1953) Yahtzee (1956) The Game of Life (1960) Twister (1965) Dungeons & Dragons (1973) Rubik’s Cube (1977) Trivial Pursuit (1982) Pictionary (1986) This is an early version of the Monopoly game.

Jigsaw Puzzles

The forerunner of the jigsaw puzzle was the “dissected puzzle” which was developed in the late 1760s and had handcut shapes and few interlocking pieces. John Spilsbury, an English mapmaker, mounted maps on a board and cut by hand around geographic boundaries to make an educational toy. The jigsaw puzzle we are familiar with today […]

Hula Hoop

Australian children twirling bamboo hoops around their waists for exercise gave Arthur Melin and Richard Knerr the idea for Hula Hoops. Their company, Wham-O, began to market the colorful plastic hoops in 1958. Hula Hoops became a craze, and people of all ages were soon swinging the large, lightweight rings around their waists, hips, arms, […]

Electronic Games

The 1970s saw the introduction of electronic games. One of the first was Hasbro’s Simon, with its pattern of flashing lights and beeps. Magnavox’s tennis video game Odyssey, invented in 1971, was followed by the popular Pong tennis game that Atari brought out for home television in 1974. 1980 was a big year in the […]

Board Games

Games provide a window on the interests and values of the times. Board games from the first half of the nineteenth century were designed to be educational and to promote religious and moral values. Educational games like “Tour of Europe: A New Geographical Pastime” (1794), “Wallis’s New Game of Universal History and Chronology” (1814), and […]

Classic Competitive Board Games

Chess (India, 7th century), checkers (Europe, 12th century), backgammon (China, 2nd century), and Parcheesi (India, 6th century) are classic games that originated in distant places centuries ago. Handmade game boards are collected by folk art enthusiasts. Toy collectors want the printed game with its box and all of its pieces. The older the set, the […]