Epic Win: Candy Land
Submitted by B Myers
For such a simple game, Candy Land was, and is, an incredible amount of fun for young kids. As an added bonus it taught us how to recognize colors and more complex objects (remember the cards with the candy canes and chocolate bars on them?).
More importantly though, Candy Land taught us that life sucks and just isn’t fair. No amount of skill or maneuvering (unless you count the cheating kind) could save you from getting within steps of the end of the game and then get the plum card sending you back almost to the very beginning. Vice versa, early on your opponent would also get the Queen Frostine card and be catapulted within a few moves from the end of the game.
Oh look, it’s the angry board gamers from the Battleship post demonstrating an example of how we all felt, being at the mercy of fate in Candy Land:
Stupidest game ever! It bored me as a toddler!
YOU LOSE!
I cheated.
>__> there I admit it, all the neighbor kids went home crying over my amazing abilities to swap cards.
Me too. I hid cards up my sleeves, stacked the deck, anything.
Clearly this was made to teach kids to cheat at a young age.
I didn’t cheat, but my parents cheated for me. When I was a kid, you had to pull a purple card to win, so sometimes I’d be close and waiting for purple, then I’d get Mr. Mint and the game would take twice as long. My parents kept a stash of purple cards just to make it end faster. There is a new version of the game where the last square is rainbow so you can win with any color. I guess my parents weren’t the only ones who were annoyed. Also, they took plumpy out of the deck completely. I used to wonder why there was a special spot on the board for him, but no card to go with it.
Even as a little kid, Candy Land held no thrills for me either.
This Candy Land is NOT the old-school version. The old-school version doesn’t have the stupid characters.
http://www.tozeero.com/sale/CANDY_LAND_vintage_game_board_9BEC94E1CF860D67882573D0007A3AB0/$file/141215.jpg
That’s the board I grew up with. It always pissed me off when people only knew the one with the characters.
Mine was even older than this, it didn’t have the picture of two kids starting the path. And I agree with you, certainly no characters.
Yep, that’s the version most of us remember. That pic they have on Nostalgia Win is from some recent one.
I don’t know, that’s the Candyland I grew up with… (The one in the post itself)
Then again, I played it from ‘92 to… I think ‘97. So maybe you guys are just older than 16.
I completely agree…I was reading the blurb under the pic and thought, “Who the hell is Queen Frostine?”
That’s the one I grew up with and played and I’m 27 and 1/2. I don’t like the new updated version of the game (or many of the other games I adored as a child). I didn’t need no stinkin’ “characters”.
I myself grew up with the one that had the characters on it. But then again I’m only 19. So I guess the one without the characters would be something that kids born over 20 or 30 years ago would remember.
I grew up with the characters one too, and I’m 25.
Is that a CLOCK?
Who the hell is fond enough of this game to make a friggin clock out of it?
*pat pat* It’s ok.. my mom said the same thing when we were little. She even dug her old board out of our great grandparents attic so we could play with the icecream float board.
I think they updated it in the 80’s because everything had little cartoons on it at that time.
Even as a small child I could not stand this game simply because there are no factors other than chance, It is 100% entirely luck
OK, someone tell me how they’re SERIOUSLY thinking of making a movie out of this!!! http://www.firstshowing.net/2009/02/05/universal-making-candy-land-with-enchanted-director/
John Candy
Candy Land
…?
Next will be “Land Before Time” (the first one, not the increasingly lame sequels)….
Then “Time Bandits”….
Then “Smokey and the Bandit”
Then “Smokey the Bear”
Then “Little Bear”
Then “Fisher Price Little People”
Then “The Fisher King”
Then “King of Fighters”
and so on, and so on…..
I have a friend who will argue that this really isn’t a game, since the outcome, though unknown, is already determined at the start of the game. I play this with my 4 yr old and cheat so he wins.
Queen Frostine was such a MILF.
Did you think that King Kandy and Queen Frostine were married and that Princess Lolipop was their daughter too?
Yup!!!
Has any one seen the most reacent board update? Frostine isn’t pretty any more! Me and my sister pretend our little plastic characters were Frostine or Lolipop, and fought over who got to be Frostine because we both liked her dress better.
lord Licorish used to scare the crap outa me. o_0
Ha, same here…Although I always convinced my sister to let me be Frostine because I was the oldest.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure we ever actually played the game. We just pretended to be the characters a lot. (Although with me and my sister, that’s how it was for everything we did when we were kids.)
even as a kid, I thought Lord Licorice looked terrifying and gay at the same time.
Dewd, you could be me talking…. I hated that lord Licorish and loved Frostine.
I was afraid of Gloppy. I mean, look at him: He’s LIVING OOZE WITH A GIANT MOUTH. Who would want to be stuck in a swamp with THAT?
There were characters in Candy Land???
in the 80’s there were
Ha I played it on the computer more then in real life. I mean It was a board game and you could take a break and do cool crap that was on the sides.
PLUMPY!?!?
SMASH!!!
No matter what, without fail, about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way to victory my Grandmother would get Plumpy. *snicker*
Ha! I hated playing this with my brother but my parents always let me win. I have the latest version of it to play with my son, but it’s just not the same! All these goofy characters and stuff, and not as many spaces from start to finish. He always wins, though, even though I don’t cheat to make him win.
Man, my mom never cheated to let me win! I was taught early that life’s a b!tch sometimes. Thanks mom!
My aunt as a kid would always try to cheat and grampa would catch her, then she’d cry. Then she was put on time out.
Now we torture her with this game.
I know EXACTLY what you mean. When I was a kid, my sister and I would ALWAYS try to cheat, but our parents would yell at us every time.
In the latest version, Queen Frostine is now Princess Frostine and is pink instead of blue. WEAK.
I used to have BibleLand.
Exactly the same but bible themed…
http://www.biblegamescompany.com/bibleland.html
Yup, and I was 27 when someone bought it for me as a joke. We never had Candy land in Australia
WHOA!!!!! I just went back in freakin time for about 5 seconds there. I LOVED the chocolatey dude, he looked dee-lish.
I think I still have this game…
Best game to play when stoned out of your mind, sharing a carton of ice cream on a rainy day.
Yeah, we had the older character-free version. I used to like playing just so I could gaze on the pictures of yummy goodies. My mom was on a major health food kick for most of my childhood so this was the closest I ever got to candy. I’m talking carob in the easter basket and handing out raisins at halloween kind of health food kick. If we had Nutrigrain cereal in the house it was a happy day as usually it was the utterly lacking in sugar version of shredded wheat or all bran or WORSE. Ah, Candy Land….
This is my least favorite game to play with my kids b/c if they don’t get the same number of people cards even if it means that they were about to get to King Candy and they got sent back to Mr. Mint, there is a fight. We have DVD Candyland as well and that is awesome!
FYI I taught my 4 and 7 year old girls how to play blackjack over the weekend (short version, 7 year old needed to write a question where the answer was 21 as part of her homework and I said stupidly said Blackjack!!) and we had more fun with a deck of cards than with all of the games at the store!
Great, now your kids will start gambling at a young age. *groan*
My little girl likes Candyland. This is changing, but for now, it’s an easy way for her to learn how to take turns in a game, go around the board the right way and learn about being a good sport. She likes the characters, so getting sent to Mr. Mint or Grandma Nutt or the like doesn’t bother her for now. There are more tears if she *doesn’t* get to visit Lolly or Frostine. The instructions that came with our game (the most recent edition) have suggestions for slowing down or speeding up a game. I take all the slow-down rules (like waiting until the right color arrives if I’m stuck on the licorice), in the hope of increasing my child’s odds of winning.
I don’t remember much about Candyland from my own youth, except that there was Molasses Swamp, which has disappeared.
My dad used to take out the candy cards so that it would end faster. My brother would rig the game so that I would get sent back to the plum but ultimately win. We definitely didn’t have those characters, just candy. I guess that would be the late 70’s, early 80’s.
“Candy Land taught us that life sucks and just isn’t fair.”
I couldn’t agree more, I hated getting the plum card.
thanks for a great post, i may put a link to it in my own blog.if thats ok with you?
cheeres
liran
Yeah, I totally punched my dad in the face over this game. To be fair, I was only 4.
When I was young, my parents went through and took out all the character cards
I remember going to school early just to play this game at the library.