Upright counter-based game with safe-cracker pretensions

This ‘Seventies entry ticks nearly all the boxes required of a board game. First off, even before the box was opened, you had the double-meaning implicit in the name (successfully exploited by the burglar-centric telly ads) insofar as not only did the red and yellow counters of the opposing sides “fall down” through the vertical playing construct, but also whilst you were trying to win you could have been assisting your competitor in their attempt to plot your “downfall”.

Secondly, it required only minutes to understand how to play, set up and go. For the record, the counters - two sets of five, numbered and in different-coloured sets to vary the manoeuvring difficulty if required - were loaded into feeder chutes, whilst all the combination-lock-inspired dials were set to a required start position. Then, in turn, each player made a single spin of any dial in an attempt to pass the counters through the dials and down to the waiting tray at the bottom¹. Most satisfying was being able to navigate a full set of counters into the bottom dial for the final turn, before watching the crestfallen reaction of your opponent as they tumbled out en masse.

Recent versions of the game have ditched the original board’s institutional blue and grey in favour of the usual kid-friendly acid colours or, in one case, stripping out the board altogether and leaving just some key-operated tumblers floating in mid-air. Call that iconic?

The aforementioned mid-Eighties ads played on the addictive qualities of the gameplay; apparently, even housebreakers would find it impossible to resist just one more go, giving the police plenty of time to turn up and arrest them: “You’ve won!” “I think we both lost!” If only there’d been one of these set up in Tony Martin’s Norfolk farmhouse it could’ve avoided a lot of silly bother.