New Old Things

I've been helping my parents clear out their loft as they're moving house. Little by way of my gaming stuff left at their house, but I did find one of the old Matchbox Models of Yesteryear.

This is what it looks like (though the pic was ripped from the web):

Jaguar SS-100 from Matchbox Models of Yesteryear

It will possibly see service in VBCW gaming - that's the plan anyway. Maybe as the personal transport of the leader of any Fascist forces. I can just imagine it with a couple of pennants flying from the radiator grille.

Another find at my parents' house was a very old game called Scoop!. It's a newspaper game: the basic idea is that the players are the editors of daily newspapers (The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and the News Chronicle, which ceased publication in 1960 and kinda dates the game). The editors spend resources to get stories that they use to fill in blocks on a mock-up of a front page; the winner (as far as I remember, I haven't played it in more than 30 years I don't think) is the first to complete the page.

The reason I bring it up is that there's a certain amount of Imagi-Nations goodness going on. One of the stories that editors can ... bid for? ... is about a war between the Stentorians and the Ugonians. I haven't examined the game in detail yet but there may be other stories which mention imaginary countries or other significant events. At the very least, there is a war between two Imagi-Nations that needs to be taken into account sometime in the 1950s (at a reasonable guess). The likely explanation is a Cold War conflict but like tension between Greece and Turkey or Chile and Argentina, it could be two Western allies that were in conflict. Or, like the USSR/Vietnam v China/Khmer Republic conflicts it could represent strife between different 'communist' countries. I shall do more research and think on.

I was reminded of another game from my childhood that features an Imagi-Nation, possibly the most famous of them all. As a kid I played a game called Contraband, which belonged to one of the friends of my parents. The game was a kind of card game that involved smuggling. Different cards involved different things that needed to be smuggled. I seem to remember these included some diamonds, a gun and the Ruritanian Crown Jewels. The game seems to have started production in the 1950s. I definitely played it around 1979, which suggests that between those times, the Ruritanian Crown Jewels were missing. I guess the reason is, Ruritania was an Eastern Bloc country between the 1950s and 1970s (probably something like 1948-1990) and the Royal Family (if it even survived) was in exile. We don't know exactly what the history of Ruritania is but that seems a reasonable supposition. If the 'ex-King' (or possibly ex-Kings) that feature in the works of Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse are anything to go by, Ruritania had suffered at least one deposed monarch by the late '20s, though whether deposed by Communist uprising, a liberal democratic republic, or Fascist takeover is entirely unclear. But whatever happened between the wars, after WWII Ruritania was likely in the Eastern Bloc. The definitive history of Ruritania is yet to be written, but there are hints at least. Sadly I don't have a copy of Contraband but I'm thinking I might try and get one. Probably should get hold of Vile Bodies too.