USSR board game rules seasons. From the cycle "USSR". board games for children. Past and present

Sometimes you want to remember how we grew up, what we played, what toys we had. Especially now that we have our own children.
Unfortunately, I myself have practically nothing left from the games of my childhood, but memories have been preserved. And after a little walk around the Internet, they materialized into pictures.))

In my personal game library, most of all there were mosaics, probably. As many as 3 pieces!
I found a couple of them on the Internet.

mosaics

Here is exactly the same, in a yellow box, with carnation elements.

The box closed very tightly and when opened, some of the chips would certainly crumble. And by the way, they were disgustingly pricked if they were scattered on the floor ... And having collected the pattern on the field, it was impossible to leave it in the box and remove it. I had to take it apart because the box wouldn’t close ((And I remember I was tormented by the thought: why are there eight compartments for elements, and only six colors? Sometimes I thought it was a marriage in my box))

There was also such a geometric mosaic, with elements of various shapes.

My favorite was a box of puzzles from the GDR. Unfortunately, I did not find an image of the exact same box, but I found a similar one.

The box contained 4 pictures from different fairy tales. In mine there were: the Bremen town musicians, Rosochka and Belyanochka, Ganz and a goose and what else ... I don’t remember.

Puzzle

I really liked puzzles. Maybe because they could be played alone?
The most famous and loved by many puzzles.

I remember that I myself saved up money and bought myself this game.
In a small box that fits easily in your pocket, there are 15 square chips with serial numbers from 1 to 15. The chips are placed in the box in random order. There remains one free field, using which you need to line up all the chips in ascending order.

Pythagoras

This is an absolute analogue of the now well-known tangram. But in the USSR, for the purpose of conspiracy, apparently, many games were given other names)) I didn’t have instructions for the game, I didn’t know that different figures should be put together from the elements, so I just put all the elements in a box for speed.

4X4

Another favorite puzzle, also bought on my own.
There are 16 chips in a box, 4 of each color. Chips are placed in a box randomly. After that, you need to collect chips of the same color in each corner, moving the chips to temporary places between the corners. To complicate the process, there was a special partition stick that blocked one of the 4 passages between the squares. It was almost impossible to collect chips with a partition.))

Rubik's Cube

Perhaps the most popular puzzle of the time. I'll admit right away that I didn't know how to assemble it. All the picking ended with sticking stickers to get one-color faces)) But many acquaintances acquired plump notebooks in which diagrams and formulas for collecting the cube were painted. And the cube was assembled in a few minutes!

Rubik's snake

This is my favorite.)) I even bought one for my daughter now and I sat and collected figurines with pleasure, remembering my childhood.

Tower

It is a cylindrical tower with rotating levels filled with multi-colored balls with one empty cell. The point is to use an empty cell to collect balls of the same color vertically.
We played in turn in the yard, sitting on a bench. And then I got such a tower in the form of a keychain.

labyrinths

There were many different ones. The point is to drive the ball to the center of the maze. Some labyrinths had several balls. The pinnacle of skill was to drive all the balls into the center.

Classic Games

This, of course, is lotto, dominoes, checkers and chess.
For some reason, now loto-domino-checkers sounds boring ... And before they were the most beloved family games. It's family.

We played loto when we were going to grandma's big company or in the country, under the light of a kerosene stove or candles. And everyone played together: we, and parents, and grandparents.

We played checkers in the evenings with dad.
In the corners - with grandfather.
And my brother and I played Chapaev.

Oh yes! More cards! But cards are a different story, there are a lot of games with them, including children's ones.

Constructors

Architect

There were plastic constructors from which it was possible to build "standard houses". The set included ceilings, panels with window blocks and doorways. In general, what kind of houses were in the USSR, such ones could be built with the help of a designer.))

cars

My brother and I had a constructor in which it was possible to assemble various cars. There were several wheelbases, blocks of various lengths and widths, transparent blocks - windows, doors for cars. It was a hit.))

Metal constructor

Everyone must have had one! What could be assembled from it seemed simply unrealistic ... They say that there were similar sets with various gears and motors, and full-fledged mechanisms could be assembled from them. That's where the expanse for the boys!

Driving game

One of the most popular games. It is being released now. And many, I know, dream of getting it for their children))
The game is a rotating disk depicting a looped road along which a small car with a magnet on its belly moves.
The goal of the game is to keep the car strictly on the roadway, fitting into turns and passing under bridges. The outer ring of the road is easier to master, the inner one is much more difficult.
It was considered the height of skill to drive at full speed through a fenced area in the corner of the road without hitting the barrier.
But the game easily lost the ignition keys (then you had to connect the wires directly), or the machine itself (then they used various other metal objects such as paper clips or coins), or the motor broke (then you had to turn the road to someone alone) ... But, nevertheless , many children dreamed about it.

Sports board games

Hockey

Table hockey was very popular among boys, most likely because hockey was very popular in the USSR in general.))
On the playing field there are figures of hockey players, which are controlled by the players. Two players, two hockey teams. One small rubber washer.
Matches were arranged almost like real ones. Many craftsmen knew some tricks of the game: they swapped players, bent sticks for better puck handling, and especially tricky ones changed hockey players’ springs to tighter ones so that the blow was stronger.
There was also table football.

Basketball

In basketball, there were no players on the field. And the field itself was covered with a plastic dome so that the ball would not fly away from the field. During the game, children were often so carried away that they hit all the buttons in a row, not paying attention to exactly where the ball fell.

fun carousel

This is nothing but a real roulette wheel. The set included a playing field, chips, a roulette ball. Everything is real. It was from this game that I learned the basic rules of how bets are made in a casino.))
Currently with gambling there is an active struggle, and in our childhood we played this game with friends.

microprocessor games

Without them - nowhere! It seems to me that there is not a single child whose childhood fell on the 80-90s who would not disappear for hours behind one of these toys.

Everyone knows "Well, wait a minute!": A black and white LCD screen on which a wolf catches eggs. The first game was released around the end of 1984. Electronic toys of the Soviet era were not cheap pleasure, such a game cost 25 rubles. For comparison, a loaf of bread cost 20 kopecks, and 1 kg of meat 2-4 rubles.
The game was copied from foreign counterparts, only the characters were replaced with more familiar ones. In fact, there were more than a dozen varieties of such games, for sure: “The Cheerful Cook”, “Autoslalom”, “Secrets of the Ocean”. I had a "Space Bridge", like this.

We often exchanged them with friends.
Here you can read and see different variants"Electronics". And find the one you had.

Walkers

Of course, there were many rpg games, with chips and dice. Such games were often printed on spreads in children's magazines such as "Funny Pictures". And now many children's magazines have resumed this tradition.

Here you can download and print some walkers of that time.
My brother and I had a hit game-walker "Kondeika". Dad brought it to us from work. More precisely, he brought the rules. We drew the field on a landscape sheet and, for reliability, glued it into a box from the "Merry Carousel". And they played a lot and for a long time.)))

And at the end of our excursion into childhood, I would like to show a few more toys that were found on the Internet and in my memory:

Children's movie camera

There were several microfilms included. You load the film, turn the knob and watch a cartoon.

Embroidery kit

The set included a cardboard book with embroidery patterns and colored threads.
I had one. I embroidered almost all the pictures.

Loom

When I was a kid, it was bigger. This is where it was clearly possible to understand how to weave matter, and what kind of work it costs. As a result, I managed to make only one small rug in Dollhouse. Pulling the main threads was an extremely difficult task ...

Today's episode will focus on board games. It was these games that replaced the lack of computer entertainment in Soviet times. Now, looking at them from the height of their age, it becomes completely incomprehensible how such a technical primitive could immerse players with great force in the very process of the game.
Each Soviet child had at least 3-4 board games in a wide variety of formats. But even this was enough to get excited for a long time and compete with whole yards for the title of the main champion in this topic.
It's hard for me to convey all the intensity of passions happening around such games. While playing games, we yelled, argued, fought, made friends, quarreled, laughed and all this at the same time.

Typically, the games involved the participation of two or more players, which contributed to the development of collective communication. Suppose that in kindergarten, the respect of their peers still had to be earned, but as soon as someone dragged a board game from the category of unusual ones there, the whole group immediately stuck for a long time.

An excellent example of such a game was the Hippos. The game has been mercilessly torn off by our industry from America. The fact is that many years later, I was surprised to find this game in one of the films where American schoolchildren were passionately cut into it.
The meaning of the game is very simple.
4 people participate in the game, a bunch of balls are poured into the middle of the field, and in order for the hippos to start eating the balls, it was enough to press the lever on the back. The more balls you eat, the better.
In general, mass hysteria began in the kindergarten that day, every single one wanted to play it, while serious battles arose for the right to turn. Basically, of course, among the boys, since the girls could correctly twitch the braid, thus eliminating the competition. The result of the first day was a bunch of abrasions and broken noses. And yet, everyone was overjoyed. Believe it or not, summer vacation was only a week away, which was sooo long before the hippo game. After the appearance of the game, kindergarten no one wanted to leave.
Then, by some miracle, I found this game on the shelves of the "children's world", after several massive brain attacks, my grandfather gave up and bought it.
I solemnly took the box with the game out into the yard, for which the parents of my friends had to thank me, we almost spent the night in the yard - we fought like that.

Here are the actual photos of this miracle of Soviet production:

One of the epic and undoubtedly legendary games of our childhood was the electronic battery-powered game "Behind the wheel".
It was an interactive car simulator. In fact, the prototype of modern computer racing only in a super real 3-d version.
It was a roundabout platform imitating part of the highway, which is separated by obstacles in the form of bridges. The front panel of the game imitated the controls of a car. Almost real steering wheel, dashboard and key start! The small plastic car was controlled by a magnet connected to the steering wheel, the speed was increased by using a lever simulating a gearbox. The goal of the game was to skillfully drive a car in order to squeeze through the narrow passages of bridges.
The game was so popular that there were huge queues of people who wanted to ride in this way. I remember that my grandmother bought me the same game, but while we were traveling with her on vacation to the village, the machine was mercilessly lost .. I'm afraid that I won't be able to describe the full scale of this drama. I had to adapt a weak imitation of everything that could resemble a weak likeness of a typewriter. But a week later a miracle happened, the same bus driver drove up to the house and handed over the car. It turns out that he found her among the passenger seats, asked the locals where her grandmother lives and brought her. And this is true, to be honest, I then hardly believed in the reality of what was happening, and firmly believed in the victory of communism on the whole earth.
The only drawback of the game was the batteries, they ended terribly quickly with pedantic cruelty, traumatizing the child's psyche. But the children's enthusiasm did not end there. The boys were immediately divided into those who turn the circle by hand and who operate the machine.

Another one of legendary games on batteries of that time, was a game called MOTOTRACK. It was quite expensive (about 25 rubles), and was operated exclusively at home.
It was a winding track, going in parts, the main component of which was a moving lift. Four plastic motorcyclists on roller skates were launched along the track, and thanks to the inertia and the special slope of the track, they rolled down to the lift, which, like an escalator, raised them to a new round of the track. After the completion of the circle, the counter was activated, measuring the number of final circles. Naturally, whoever runs faster wins. The game delivered amazing automation of the process and an exciting assembly of the track itself.
The track could be further expanded with a second motorcycle track.
The game itself made an indelible impression on the participants. gameplay, and caused genuine envy among those who were lucky enough to be the owner of this miracle. I had 3 such games, of course not in a row, but as the parts of the road and the lift itself stayed, because when the batteries ran out and the game got boring, the lift was dismantled for spare parts. Naturally, although he was going back, for some reason he did not work. Unfortunately, on the vast expanses of the network, I found only one photo of this miracle.

The game " sea ​​battle»

When I was 5 years old, at that time my mother and I lived on Mechnikov Street. Next to me lived a neighbor boy who was much older than me, he was 12. At that time, I often visited him to visit to see what he had interesting toys. At that time, there was a fashion for beer caps with drawings from imported bottles, and he had a fairly large collection of rarities won during the battles. In addition, on the wall he had black and white pictures from the albums of such bands as Iron Maiden, Manowar, Cried, Keys, etc. To be honest, due to my young age, I didn’t really understand what was good in the pictures that depict skulls and the dead, but under the strong authority of an older comrade, I immediately realized that it was very cool.
Most of all I was interested in his soldiers depicting Neanderthals and Vikings, as well as the technology of making soldiers from colored wire. And then one day, to his misfortune, when he was tired of listening to my endless speech, he inadvertently took a dusty box with the game from the closet and showed it to me.
That's when I hung up. The game seemed to me something unrealistically cool, the coolest thing that I had seen before.
The game was a platform imitating the sea area, with towers of naval military guns located opposite each other, similar to those that stood on ships.

Along the edges of the platform, models of ships were installed, which had to be shot down with steel balls loaded into cannons. A cunning periscope of small mirrors was built into the cannon, so that the aiming was carried out precisely on it. The one who quickly knocked out the enemy squadron won. The more accurate the hit, the more nishtyakov. In general, after what I saw, I slept very badly, I dreamed of the game and the ships. From the next day, I stuck to him like a knife to the throat with a request to give the game.
A week later, he still gave up and my happiness knew no bounds.

Board game "Basketball"

In my opinion, only Soviet engineers could have thought of creating such a basketball game simulator. She was brutal like all Soviet toys, and besides, such a game could easily be killed on the spot. Apparently it was developed with the expectation of successful use during hostilities, as an alternative weapon.
The main memory associated with this game are calluses on the fingers, no matter how ridiculous it may sound.
The meaning of the game was simple, like everything in the USSR. The ball was a plastic ping-pong ball. With the help of levers on springs, blows were made on the ball. The main goal was to throw the ball into the basket.
I remember how they drew tournament tables for yard competitions. In the final, as a rule, it was the most difficult to play, as the fingers ached from pain and they no longer obeyed their own hands. There was a lot of excitement!
The main disadvantages were corns, a breaking ball and springs weakening over time.

Another of the rarest games at that time was the Young Chemist set. I remember how caring relatives gave it to me in the 5th grade.
Such a set was the object of fierce envy of absolutely everyone, as it contained chemicals that were quite valuable for that time. If I'm not mistaken, the manufacturers of this time bomb were Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps in this way our state wanted to instill in schoolchildren a love for chemistry.
But it seems to me that this only spurred interest in explosive activity.
At first, I honestly tried to carry out the simplest experiments described in the carefully enclosed booklet, until a kid from a neighboring house found out about my treasure. His parents were chemists, of course, he was well versed in all reagents.
I still wonder how we did not burn down the house, but the surrounding houses have more than suffered from our joint experiments.
A special triumph was the laying of slow explosives in one of the basements of the nearest high-rise building. When it exploded, I sinfully thought that the house had outlived its last hours. But instead of the destroyed walls, the glasses just flew out along with the cats living there. Hiding like partisans on the roof of our unofficial observation post, we only decided to go out into the courtyard in the evening, and with an honest look tried to make a face of surprise about what had happened.
And the set, by the way, was really good, a bunch of flasks, a spirit lamp on dry alcohol, various tubes, etc.

alternative to CHEMIST-Junior electrician

Board game "Football". In the days of the USSR, football was much more popular than in our time, apparently mainly due to the fact that in those days our footballers still won something. Therefore, the board game of the same name was especially fond of us. The meaning of the game is very simple, instead of a ball, a metal ball was used, which was passed between the players and then hammered into the goal.
Each of the parties controlling almost all the players in turn. The game was released in two versions, the first with spring and push-button controls. Push-button was more convenient, as it allowed you to play remotely.
Special battles were arranged during the World Cup. Serious passions flared up, and high school students did not disdain to play the game.

Actual toy with spring control:

Pushbutton control:

And here is another kind of football on batteries. To be honest, I've never seen one like this, so I don't know how to manage it.

Another of the most outstanding games of that time was the Helicopter game.
With the help of the control panel, the flight of a toy helicopter model with a mandatory landing was simulated. The skill was in the precise landing of the helicopter.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have such a game, and I only enviously played it at one of the homies at home. Impressions were cosmic.

cool toy

Here are some of the girls favorite games

Board games were popular in our country both under the kings and under the general secretaries. But if under the kings the games were just games, a means to pass the time, then in Soviet times games began to bear also educational and propaganda load. But let's look at Soviet board games in more detail ...

"Flight Moscow-China". (1925) In the 1910s and during the First World War, aircraft were built in our country, but our country was not included in the elite club of leading aviation powers. Why? Well, for example, here is one of the reasons - everyone knows that an airplane does not fly without an engine, and engine building was in its infancy in Tsarist Russia. And the most important "detail" for Russian aircraft had to be purchased abroad. The new government decided to put an end to technological backwardness. The slogan "catch up and overtake" came into use towards the end of the twenties - in the era of industrialization. But the joint-stock company "Dobrolet" (Russian Joint-Stock Company of the Voluntary Air Fleet) appeared already in 1923.

The goal of the founders of the society was to promote the development of domestic civil aviation - passenger, postal, cargo. The society has existed for 7 years. During this time, Dobrolet aircraft flew almost 10 million kilometers, transported 47 thousand passengers and 408 tons of cargo (a very good result for an airline of the twenties). Dobrolet also advertised its activities with the help of board games. The game "Flight Moscow-China" is extremely simple - by throwing dice, players must get to Beijing as quickly as possible, taking off from the Moscow airfield. "Electrification" (1928) "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country" - said V.I. Lenin. The words of the first head of the country by the Council did not differ from the deeds. In February 1920, the GOELRO plan (State Plan for the Electrification of Russia) was adopted. The result of this plan was the widely advertised "light bulbs of Ilyich", which caught fire even in the most remote villages of our vast country. Of course, the "electrification of the whole country" could not but be reflected in board games.

Electrification could be played by two to four players. It offers players large and small cards with pictures. There are only four large ones - a village, a city, an aul, a port. These cards are divided among the players - these are the objects that they must electrify. The small cards are shuffled and distributed to the players. Players draw cards from their neighbors and set aside paired pictures. In the end, they should be left with unpaired pictures with electric bulbs. According to the number of such cards on the playing field, fields closed by circles open - electrified objects. The one who electrified his part of the playing field first, he turned out to be the winner. "Let's give raw materials to factories" (1930) 1930 - the First Five-Year Plan is in full swing, industrialization is in full swing, giant factories are being built in the country, huge industrial areas. Of course, manufacturers of board games could not ignore the topic of industrialization.


In the game "Let's Give Raw Materials to Factories", players had to roll dice to move around playing field and collect various recyclables, which will be recycled in the game factories. The winner, of course, was the one who gave the factories more raw materials. "Lenin goes to Smolny" (1970) And now from the twenties and thirties, let's fast forward to the era of "developed socialism." In April 1970, our country celebrated the centenary of the birth of the leader of the world proletariat, V. I. Lenin. The children's magazine "Funny Pictures" could not stay away from this festival either. On the pages of the magazine in the "anniversary" April issue, the game "Lenin Goes to Smolny" was published. The game was a classic "maze" - the players had to spend Ilyich on the historic night of October 24-25, according to the old style, from a safe house in Smolny.


Nighttime Petrograd abounded with dangers - patrols, mounted junkers. However, for many players, a walk around the nighttime pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg seemed boring, and almost immediately a "multiplayer version" of this game appeared. There were already several players and Lenins, and the player whose Lenin reached Smolny first won. Board games in the first decades of the existence of Soviet power were both a means of propaganda and a kind of pre-conscription training. And there is nothing wrong with that. In the twenties, our country was preparing to repel a new intervention (severance of diplomatic relations with England, Curzon's ultimatum, "military alert"). After January 30, 1933, one did not need to be a great seer or a brilliant World War inevitable (it was enough to read tangentially two hundred pages of the text of the Treaty of Versailles or read its summary in the newspapers). So, desktop military-patriotic propaganda, designed for future soldiers and commanders, was not superfluous at all. One should not be surprised at the abundance of "wargames" (war games or simply board strategies) that came out in our country in the twenties and thirties. We will not dwell on the rules of these games for a long time - a "wargame" is a "wargame". Let's take a look at the scanned game boxes.
















Board games were popular both in Tsarist Russia and in the Soviet Union. Many games turned out to be long-lived - after the change of power and the political system, only the name and design changed, and the "gameplay" remained unchanged. But in 1985, the government changed again in our country and the so-called "perestroika" began. Along with the policy of the party and government, board games have also changed. So, the games of the perestroika era. "Enchanted Country" In 1970, the Americans Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released the first board game from the endless Dungeon & Dragons series (or D&D for short - Dungeons and Dragons). Players fell into the world of heroic fantasy, and got used to the roles mighty warriors, wise magicians, immortal elves and other heroes of books popular at that time about worlds ruled by sword and magic.


Coded Country Map In the Soviet Union, such a historical event as the birth of D&D went unnoticed. Table role-playing games in our country were not popular (from role playing except that the field game "Zarnitsa" in pioneer camps was popular with us). The reason for this unpopularity is simple - the complete absence of tabletop role-playing games. Citizens of our country could get acquainted with something similar to D&D only in 1990, when the Autumn cooperative published the board game Enchanted Country in a circulation of 40,000 copies. The game was a loose variation on the theme of the very first and simplest versions of Dungeons and Dragons.

There is a playing field with locations, there is a leader's book with detailed description of what awaits players in these locations, there are characters that players can play, there are cards with monsters and their "tactical and technical characteristics", and, finally, there are dice with which the outcomes of game fights were decided. The game instantly gained " cult" status - traveling through the "Enchanted Land" carried away very many. Like many other things in the last years of the existence of the USSR, the game belonged to the category of "deficit" (at that time, not only board games, but also many food products were in short supply). But those who got acquainted with it literally made their versions of the game "on their knees" . Largely thanks to the "Enchanted Country" in Russia, the role-playing movement was born. an oligarch (this game was especially relevant precisely in the early thirties, in the midst of the largest crisis in the history of the world economy - in America, the richest country in the world, millions of people were left without a livelihood). But in our country there was a socialist planned economy, crises did not affect us in any way, but Monopoly did not correspond in any way to the "general line of the party." The first Soviet desktop economic simulator was Conversion.


In the last years of the existence of the Soviet Union, the word "conversion" was very popular. Translated from Latin, it means "conversion" or "transformation." First of all, at that time they talked about the conversion in the military industry - the transformation of military factories into factories that produce purely peaceful products. And then we have a lot of missiles, planes and tanks, but, for example, there are few household appliances. Let's not talk about how this conversion was carried out - this is a topic for a separate extremely politicized article, let's talk about the game. At first glance at the game box, it becomes clear another meaning of the word "conversion". Yes, it's clear to everyone we are talking about the convertibility of the ruble. In the history of the Soviet Union there was a convertible currency - chervonets backed by gold (and the rate of chervonets on international currency exchanges sometimes almost caught up with the rate of the British pound sterling). But by the time the “Conversion” was released, there was one monetary unit in the country - the ruble, which was called “wooden” at that time, because it was impossible to buy anything outside of our country with rubles. No, again, we won’t talk about whether it is good or bad when the national currency is convertible and can be easily withdrawn abroad. Let's talk about the game.


Playing field This is not a clone of Monopoly, but a completely independent game. Several people are playing. One of the players takes on the duties of a banker - distributes the starting capital to the rest of the players. The banker's duty is called "voluntary and disinterested" in the rules of the game. But according to the same rules, the banker in the game is not completely disinterested - during any of the moves, he can give any player a loan at extortionate interest - he took 100 thousand, return 150 thousand on the next move. Starting capital can be spent on the purchase of raw materials, factories, transport funds. And in the future to engage in the production of goods, the extraction of raw materials or the transportation of raw materials or goods. Everything produced or mined from the earth can be sold either on the domestic market for rubles, or on the external market for dollars (there was also the opportunity to change rubles for dollars at the game rate). During each of the moves, the player must perform one of the actions - buy, sell, send the goods to the customer, take a loan. Whether the Russian oligarchs, who regularly appear on the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires, played Conversion, is not known for certain.


This is how the internal market of the USSR looks like in the game


And this is how the American market looks like in the game, where you can come with your product "Glasnost" Perhaps this is the first case of a "licensed" and "localized" game being published in our country. Even if not a computer one, but a desktop one (the very idea that computer games there are some copyright holders out there who want some money, would have seemed ridiculous to the citizens of our country at the end of the eighties).

The board game Glasnost was released in America in 1989. At that time, everything connected with the Soviet Union was popular in America. It cannot be said that the "Soviet" theme did not come up in American board games, films, cartoons, and comics before. But during the years of the Cold War, from the point of view of the Americans, Soviet Russians were bestial villains, ruthless bloodthirsty aggressors, dreaming of dominating the world and mass unjustified repressions. During the years of "perestroika" for a short time, the image of Russians in American mass culture changed "polarity". If in 1984 Red Dawn, a film about brave American teenagers who organized a partisan detachment on the territory occupied by Soviet invaders, became a hit in American film distribution, in 1988 Red Heat became a movie hit, a film in which a purely positive image the Soviet policeman was embodied on the screen by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.


The Glasnost game was just about establishing peaceful political and economic relations between the two superpowers. The players had to get used to the roles of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, conduct political debates, and conclude economic deals. The political and economic aspects of the game were influenced by cards with news about what was happening in the world, in the Soviet Union and in America. The players had the opportunity to really establish equal partnership relations between America and our country, without losing one position after another, like this Gorbachev made "non-fiction". The game was promptly translated into Russian and published in our country in a large circulation. Now this game has been long and firmly forgotten on both sides of the Atlantic - the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and board games about it have become irrelevant. And finally: A selection of photos of Soviet board games and designers from different years

Board games were popular in our country under both tsars and general secretaries. But if, under the tsars, games were just games, a means to pass the time, then in Soviet times, games began to carry an educational and propaganda load. But let's look at Soviet board games in more detail ...

"Flight Moscow-China". (1925)

"Electrification" (1928)

"Let's give raw materials to factories" (1930)

"Lenin goes to Smolny" (1970)

"Enchanted Country"

Conversion

"Publicity"

Board games were popular in our country under both tsars and general secretaries. But if, under the tsars, games were just games, a means to pass the time, then in Soviet times, games began to carry an educational and propaganda load.
But let's look at Soviet board games in more detail ...

"Flight Moscow-China". (1925)
In the 1910s and during the First World War, aircraft were built in our country, but our country was not included in the elite club of leading aviation powers. Why? Well, for example, here is one of the reasons - everyone knows that an airplane does not fly without an engine, and engine building was in its infancy in Tsarist Russia. And the most important "detail" for Russian aircraft had to be purchased abroad.
The new government decided to put an end to technological backwardness. The slogan "catch up and overtake" came into use towards the end of the twenties - in the era of industrialization. But the joint-stock company "Dobrolet" (Russian Joint-Stock Company of the Voluntary Air Fleet) appeared already in 1923.

The goal of the founders of the society was to promote the development of domestic civil aviation - passenger, postal, cargo. The society has existed for 7 years. During this time, Dobrolet aircraft flew almost 10 million kilometers, transported 47 thousand passengers and 408 tons of cargo (a very good result for an airline of the twenties).
Dobrolet also advertised its activities with the help of board games. The game "Flight Moscow-China" is extremely simple - by throwing dice, players must get to Beijing as quickly as possible, taking off from the Moscow airfield.
"Electrification" (1928)
“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” said V. I. Lenin. The words of the first leader of the Country by the Council did not differ from the deeds.
In February 1920, the GOELRO plan (State Plan for the Electrification of Russia) was adopted. The result of this plan was the widely advertised "light bulbs of Ilyich", which caught fire even in the most remote villages of our vast country. Of course, the "electrification of the whole country" could not but be reflected in board games.

Electrification could be played by two to four players. It offers players large and small cards with pictures. There are only four large ones - a village, a city, an aul, a port. These cards are divided among the players - these are the objects that they must electrify.
The small cards are shuffled and dealt to the players. Players draw cards from their neighbors and set aside paired pictures. In the end, they should be left with unmatched pictures of electric light bulbs.
According to the number of such cards on the playing field, fields closed by circles are opened - electrified objects. The one who electrified his part of the playing field first, he was the winner.
"Let's give raw materials to factories" (1930)
1930 - the First Five-Year Plan is in full swing, industrialization is in full swing, giant factories are being built in the country, huge industrial regions are springing up literally from scratch. Of course, manufacturers of board games could not ignore the topic of industrialization.


In the game "Let's Give Raw Materials to Factories", players had to roll dice to move around the playing field and collect various recyclable materials that will be processed in the game factories. The winner, of course, was the one who gave the factories more raw materials.
"Lenin goes to Smolny" (1970)
And now, from the twenties - thirties, let's fast forward to the era of "developed socialism." In April 1970, our country celebrated the centenary of the birth of the leader of the world proletariat, V. I. Lenin. The children's magazine "Veselye Kartinki" could not stay away from this festival either.
On the pages of the magazine in the "anniversary" April issue, the game "Lenin goes to Smolny" was published. The game was a classic "maze" - the players had to spend Ilyich on the historic night of October 24-25, according to the old style, from a safe house in Smolny.


Nighttime Petrograd abounded with dangers - patrols, mounted junkers. However, for many players, a walk around the nighttime pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg seemed boring, and almost immediately a “multiplayer version” of this game appeared. There were already several players and Lenins, and the player whose Lenin reached Smolny first won.
Board games in the first decades of the existence of Soviet power were both a means of propaganda and a kind of means of pre-conscription training. And there is nothing wrong with that. In the 1920s, our country was preparing to repel a new intervention (severance of diplomatic relations with England, Curzon's ultimatum, "military alert").
After January 30, 1933, one did not need to be a great seer or a brilliant analyst to guess that a new world war was inevitable (it was enough to read two hundred pages of the text of the Treaty of Versailles tangentially or read its summary in the newspapers). So, desktop military-patriotic propaganda, designed for future soldiers and commanders, was not at all superfluous.
One should not be surprised at the abundance of "wargames" (war games or simply board strategies) that came out in our country in the twenties and thirties. We won’t dwell on the rules of these games for a long time - a “wargame” is a “wargame”. Let's take a look at the scanned game boxes.
















Board games were popular both in Tsarist Russia and in the Soviet Union. Many games turned out to be long-lived - after the change of power and the political system, only the name and design changed, and the “gameplay” remained unchanged.
But in 1985, the government changed again in our country and the so-called “perestroika” began. Along with the policy of the party and government, board games have also changed. So, the games of the era of perestroika.
"Enchanted Country"
In 1970, Americans Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released the first board game from the endless Dungeon & Dragons series (or D&D for short - Dungeons and Dragons).
The players got into the world of heroic fantasy, and got used to the role of powerful warriors, wise magicians, immortal elves and other heroes of books popular at that time about worlds ruled by sword and magic.


Coded Country Map
In the Soviet Union, such a historic event as the birth of D&D went unnoticed. Tabletop role-playing games were not popular in our country (of the role-playing games, only the field game "Zarnitsa" in pioneer camps was popular in our country). The reason for this unpopularity is simple - the complete absence of tabletop role-playing games.
Citizens of our country could get acquainted with something similar to D&D only in 1990, when the Autumn cooperative published the board game Enchanted Country in a circulation of 40,000 copies. The game was a loose variation on the theme of the very first and simplest versions of Dungeons and Dragons.

There is a playing field with locations, there is a leader's book with a detailed description of what awaits players in these locations, there are characters that players can play, there are cards with monsters and their "tactical and technical characteristics", and, finally, there are dice, with the help of which the outcomes of game fights were decided.
The game instantly gained a "cult" status - traveling through the "Enchanted Land" captivated many. Like many other things in the last years of the existence of the USSR, the game belonged to the category of "deficit" (at that time not only board games were in short supply, but also many food products).
But those who got acquainted with it literally made their own versions of the game “on their knees”. Largely thanks to the "Enchanted Country" in Russia, the role-playing movement was born.
Conversion
The famous "Monopoly", created in America in the midst of the Great Depression, instantly became a bestseller all over the world.
Still, with the help of this game, everyone could feel like a tycoon or an oligarch (this game was especially relevant precisely in the early thirties, in the midst of the largest crisis in the history of the world economy - in America, the richest country in the world, millions of people were left without livelihood).
But in our country there was a socialist planned economy, crises did not affect us in any way, but Monopoly did not correspond in any way to the "general line of the party." The first Soviet desktop economic simulator was Conversion.


In the last years of the existence of the Soviet Union, the word "conversion" was very popular. Translated from Latin, it means "conversion" or "transformation."
First of all, at that time they talked about the conversion in the military industry - the transformation of military factories into factories that produce purely peaceful products. And then we have a lot of missiles, planes and tanks, but, for example, there are few household appliances.
Let's not talk about how this conversion was carried out - this is a topic for a separate extremely politicized article, let's talk about the game.
When you first look at the game box, another meaning of the word "conversion" becomes clear. Yes, it is clear to everyone that we are talking about the convertibility of the ruble.
In the history of the Soviet Union, there was a convertible currency - chervonets backed by gold (and the rate of chervonets on international currency exchanges sometimes almost caught up with the rate of the British pound sterling). But by the time the "Conversion" was released, there was one monetary unit in the country - the ruble, which was called "wooden" at that time, because it was impossible to buy anything for rubles outside our country.
No, again, we will not talk about whether it is good or bad when the national currency is convertible and can be easily transferred abroad. Let's talk about the game.


playing field
This is not a clone of Monopoly, but a completely independent game. Several people are playing. One of the players takes on the duties of a banker - distributes the starting capital to the rest of the players.
The duty of a banker is called in the rules of the game "voluntary and disinterested." But according to the same rules, the banker in the game is not completely disinterested - during any of the moves, he can give any player a loan at extortionate interest - he took 100 thousand, return 150 thousand on the next move.
Starting capital can be spent on the purchase of raw materials, factories, vehicles. And in the future to engage in the production of goods, the extraction of raw materials or the transportation of raw materials or goods. Everything produced or mined from the earth can be sold either on the domestic market for rubles, or on the external market for dollars (there was also the opportunity to exchange rubles for dollars at the game rate).
During each of the moves, the player must perform one of the actions - buy, sell, send cargo to the customer, take a loan. Whether the Russian oligarchs, who regularly appear on the Forbes magazine's list of billionaires, played Conversion, is not known for certain.


This is how the internal market of the USSR looks like in the game


And this is how the American market looks like in the game, where you can come with your goods
"Publicity"
Perhaps, this is the first time that a “licensed” and “localized” game has been published in our country. Even if not a computer one, but a desktop one (the very idea that computer games have some kind of copyright holders who want some money, would have seemed simply ridiculous to the citizens of our country in the late eighties).

The board game Glasnost was released in America in 1989. At that time, everything connected with the Soviet Union was popular in America.
It cannot be said that the “Soviet” theme did not come up in American board games, films, cartoons, and comics before. But during the Cold War, from the point of view of the Americans, the Soviet Russians were bestial villains, ruthless bloodthirsty aggressors, dreaming of world domination and massive unjustified repressions.
During the years of “perestroika”, for a short time, the image of Russians in American popular culture changed “polarity”. If in 1984 Red Dawn, a film about brave American teenagers who organized a partisan detachment on the territory occupied by Soviet invaders, became a hit in American film distribution, in 1988 Red Heat became a hit, a film in which a purely positive image the Soviet policeman was embodied on the screen by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.


The Glasnost game was just about establishing peaceful political and economic relations between the two superpowers.
Players had to get used to the roles of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States, conduct political debates, and conclude economic deals. The political and economic aspects of the game were influenced by cards with news about what was happening in the world, in the Soviet Union and in America.
The players had the opportunity to truly establish equal partnerships between America and our country, without giving up one position after another, as the “non-gaming” Gorbachev did.
The game was promptly translated into Russian and published in our country in large numbers. Now this game has been long and firmly forgotten on both sides of the Atlantic - the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and board games about it have become irrelevant.
And finally: A selection of photos of Soviet board games and designers from different years