Don’t wake Daddy was the Candy Land of My Generation

There have been worse ideas for board games besides Don’t Wake Daddy, but that game was called Hungry Hungry Hippos, and it made millions, so I won’t go into that.

But besides those hedonistic hippos and their white ball hoarding feasts, DWD was quite possibly the dumbest idea anybody could have ever conceived of, rivaled only by Polio and Andrew Dice Clay’s career.

The premise of the game was simple. You picked up your pieces, went doo di doo di doo, around the board, while some jerkoff would hit the button by daddy’s bed until he woke up and everybody, in unison, mind you, would shout, “Don’t-wake-daddy!” In the mean time, your real daddy, taking a nap after a hard day at the sulfur factory, would wake up and wallop you with a day old Daily News for disturbing his sleep before dinner. (“I told you kids! I told you! Daddy needs sleep!”)

Another great game, and by great, I mean terrible, was Trouble. It seems that every board game back then in the Paleozoic Era I was born in had some kind of stupid thing to shout out as you progress, with this particular utterance being, yep, you guessed it (or maybe you just knew it): “TROUBLE!”

I don’t quite remember the rules of the game, or even if it was actually a game at all (it could have been a piece of propaganda to successfully elect Spiro Agnew, I’m not quite sure). But what I do remember was that it wasn’t fun, and actually caused trouble in my own life when I stepped on it on purpose when my friend’s little sister was having a slumber party. That girl’s mother made me pay for a new game for her with my own money. I never talked to that friend or his sister ever again.

But where was I going with this?

Oh, yeah, DON’T-WAKE-DADDY!

As much as I hate the game, you gotta love that title.