Simple games of uncomplicated times

I don’t believe in the ‘back in my day’ mantra many nostalgics cling to, nor do I bore my children with memories of my childhood and the wonderful games we played when there was no Internet and no screens everywhere. Yet, I couldn’t resist buying this silly little game card which I think is one of the very few things that didn’t change with the times. At all. Any child playing it today will have no idea just what a communist game it basically is, just as I certainly didn’t understand the subtle propaganda behind it when I was I kid. In a country trying to shed its communist past, the beloved ‘Pacalici’ of my childhood lives on undisturbed. I don’t even know how to translate its name - The Clown, The Joker or The Fool, as in April Fool. It’s pretty simple, you just have to make pairs of each nationality represented and the one stuck with The Fool loses.

The hidden propaganda lies in the nationalities represented, all of them from friendly communist countries. In that world, there were no Americans, English, French or Japanese. Instead, kids were presented with images of Albanians or Mongolians, in traditional costumes. Even the Vietnamese are represented, although at the time this game was popular, the Vietnamese would have been better described as hiding from the bombs, covered in blood. And the Chinese should have worn the infamous uniforms of Mao’s cultural revolution, not ornate costumes that seem to be dating from an imperial past.

That was a time when kids weren’t bombarded with images of impossibly thin models, girls didn’t grow up wishing to have big butts and duck-faces. I wanted to be like the Hungarian girl in the cards, she was my favorite. When I got a little bit older, I managed to get my hands on a deck of cards with sexy ladies, with fancy bras and sensual attitudes, but that’s a different story.
As we opened the game today, it struck me just how politically incorrect the cards are. You’d have a full-blown Twitter storm if somebody tried to sell these cards anywhere in the Western world.

For some reason, there’s no distinction made between the different peoples of Africa. It’s just Africans - and all we needed to know was that all black people wear colorful costumes, very simple and sort of cheap. The sign thought to better describe them was that of a palm tree. Thank God it was not a banana!
The Arabs don’t fare much better, wearing some sort of bed sheets and carrying a jug of water. But then again, those were much simpler times, before the oil industry boom that most Arab countries become very rich.
In Romania, I’ve heard of various initiatives to preserve the toys of our childhood, which are now collectors’ items. Pictures of old games and rubber toys are stored on several sites. A few years ago there was even an exhibition of old toys at the History Museum. My kids obviously didn’t get what was so exciting about plastic monkeys on a stick and yellow cats, but for me it was fun to revisit my childhood.

What about you? Do you still have any toys from your childhood? The games you played would they be appropriate today?

Thanks for reading