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Lose Your Marbles With Pac-Man

Pac-Man: The Board Game Remember back when video games were a mysterious new kind of entertainment and how corporations accustomed to certain mediums went out of their way to adapt the popular games of the day into non-electronic revenue generators?  Some may argue we're still in that time period now, but in this case I'm directing your attention to 1982.  Break out the marbles, kids, 'cause we're gonna play Pac-Man: The Board Game!

There's the plastic player pieces and the two enemy 'Ghost' figures. You get to pick from four different Pac-Man figures in various colors. Obviously, most would likely go for the classic pale yellow, but let's not discount the red one as a more raging, angry, first-finishing Pac-piece. The blue and green ones were crap - those were there in case your mother made you play with the snot-handed retards down the block.

The playing board was a thing of beauty, masterfully recreating the famous Pac-maze from the arcade game. If you'll notice, 72 white marbles line the board, each representing a pellet and each fitted into precut holes. There's four more marbles on the board, too - yellow ones, representing the 'power pellets' Pac-Man swallows whenever he's in the mood to eat something supernatural.

Once upon a time my grandmother perused garage sales in search of new used toys for us grandkids.  At some point in the mid-to-late 1980s she picked up the Pac-Man game for us to play.  Of course, being a garage sale item meant that it was missing most of the parts and was therefore unplayable as Milton Bradley intended.  I remember playing with the ghost figurines and the marble-scarfing Pac-Man playing pieces more than I do trying to play the game itself.  At least one part of the Pac experience carried over to the board game, however: Granny paid a twenty-five cents for the game.

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