11 Games The Stranger Things Kids Might Have Played Besides Dungeons & Dragons
[First published on www.tabletoptribe.com]
We’re told it’s a Golden Age of Board Games right now, but for those of us that grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, that age felt equally golden for the tabletop, although increasingly challenged by consoles and home computers.
Not only were Milton Bradley and Waddingtons churning out titles fit to bust, but a brand new type of game, invented the previous decade, was just getting into its stride: the role-playing game (RPG).
But barring Dungeons & Dragons (DnD) along with Atari consoles and Pac Man, plus the predictable board game staples of Monopoly, Sorry and the like, what tabletop games might some nerdy kids from the 1980s have played?
Fortunately, I was just such a geeky 11/12 year old in 1983/84 when Stranger Things is set, which was handy for research, but sadly also meant the excellent Cosmic Encounter (1977) didn’t make the cut, as amazingly I was blissfully unaware of its existence until the 1986 Games Workshop 2nd edition.