October: Retail thoughts have already turned to Christmas. In the last week I’ve encountered Christmas trees in shops and been encouraged to book my Christmas party in the local pub ‘before it’s too late!’. A staple of Christmas time is a family board game, and I saw this one last week among the tinsel, it’s Scrabble Classic. I didn’t really notice the difference to begin with but I was drawn to the box because it was so nice and clean as I remembered. It turns out I was looking at a rerelease of the original design, Scrabble these days actually looks like this:

Many of the board games I used to know and love when I was younger are still around, but they don’t look like they used to. No, kids these days can’t indulge in a little word play without imagining the triple word score being mugged for it’s iPod by anthromorphosised hoodlum CGI K and S tiles. The tiles have to be characters, there has to be action, or at least a drop shadow or gradient. (They make the tiles themselves out of recycled Robosapien plastic rather than wood these days) Still, the makers of Scrabble must have decided there’s a market for games as they used to be, hence their reissue of the original design.

I wondered what other classics have had to admit defeat in the new age of Wii Sports and Ben 10. It turns out Cluedo, which as everyone knows, looks like this:

Now looks like a knock-off Facebook version of The Sims:

Check out that swimming pool. And, hang on a minute, where’s the Library? Don’t these people read any more? Oh, don’t worry, there’s a spa instead. Phew.

It gets worse though, look what they’ve done to the box:

All of a sudden the rich Agatha Christie world of well-spoken murder has become a bad episode of Eastenders.

Nevermind, at least they can’t f*ck with Monopoly….

…oh.