Uncle Wiggily

Have you ever heard of Uncle Wiggily? If you're not a member of our family, I'm guessing not. He's a children's literary character created around 1910. My dad has lots of Uncle Wiggily books. And... wait for it... the Uncle Wiggily board game--the same one he played seventy-five years ago as a kid!

A few nights ago a bunch of us were all at my parents' house, and five of the six grandkids, ranging in ages from 6th grade to recent college graduate, were all hanging out in the family room playing board games.

Now that in and of itself should be a blog post all by itself, which I will do when I'm done with this one. THIS one, however, is specifically about kids playing the Uncle Wiggily board game.

Now, just for comparative purposes, here is the Uncle Wiggily game next to the Candy Land game.



You know when you play Candy Land how fun it is to get the cards that sends you to the Lollipop Woods? Or you get to go the Peppermint Forest? Or best of all you end up getting to take the Gumdrop Pass shortcut? The entire game is all pretty delicious sounding and very kid-friendly stuff. What kid wouldn't want to play and win Candy Land and end up being King Candy in the Candy Castle? That's a pretty kid-friendly reason to want to win the game.

The Uncle Wiggily game, on the other hand, has as it's destination for the winning player:
Dr. Possum's office. Why, you ask, is getting to Dr. Possum's office how you win the game? Because, and I don't know how you didn't think of this, the purpose of playing Uncle Wiggily's game is to help Uncle Wiggily get help for his nagging illness of rheumatism. I'm not making this up. That's an actual direct quote from the instructions.

Given that you now know the objective of this game designed for four year olds, ask yourself what might the cards that you would draw to move around the board say? Buckle up. You're gonna love this. For your amusement, here is a sampling of some of the cards:

"For Uncle Wiggily there are two jumps. I hope he hits no jagged stumps." Watch it, guy with rheumatism. That's not all you have to worry about apparently!

"A cabbage lollypop now and then will gain Uncle Wiggily a hop of ten." Yum. Cabbage lollypops.

"Uncle Wiggily sees a cabbage and goes back seven hops to get it for Nurse Jane Fuzzy his Muskrat Lady Housekeeper." I'm not sure there isn't something slightly dirty there, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

"Oh my! Uncle Wiggily's rheumatism crutch catches in the crack of a log and you lose one turn." For a guy with rheumatism Uncle Wiggily maybe shouldn't be out hiking over logs and jagged stumps.

I can't imagine sitting down with Olivia and Steven when they were little and getting excited about getting to Dr. Possum's office so Uncle Wiggily can get help for his rheumatism, which is already so bad that he's using a crutch. First off I think I would have had to look up rheumatism to explain it to the kids, and I think just the premise might have made Olivia cry.

And also, who makes a kids' game with the objective of getting to the doctor's office?

A different era in games, I guess. It probably didn't phase my dad at all to play the Uncle Wiggily game as a youngster, especially since he had read all of the Uncle Wiggily books. The rheumatism was probably just part of the storyline.

I guess I should just be thankful that the five grandkids weren't all playing a rousing game of Cards Against Humanity.