Why play for free what you can pay a tenner for?

“Kids these days are sharp,” people have always said. “You can’t fool ‘em. They know all the angles. Smarter than most adults, in fact.” This didn’t apply, necessarily, to the kids who were – ahem – roped in and quizzed by the marketing department of Milton Bradley on the day Hangman was conceived. What point, we have to ask ourselves, was there in paying for a plastic version of a game you could easily do with two pencils and a bit of paper?

Perhaps it was just us, because they sold in many and varied forms - Squares, Computer Battleship (which, to be fair, was a veritable symphony of light and sound), any number of noughts and crosses variants, and Hangman. The imperial-era version (circa ’78) featured Vincent Price on the box, leaning on the gibbet and preparing to mete out justice in a faux Old Wild West town (probably just off the East Lancs road). ‘Cos frankly, since all that Ruth Ellis nonsense, us Brits really didn’t go in for death by gallows unless it came in primary-coloured plastic with a Wyatt Earp type on the lid.

Advertised, therefore, by a pair of senile bank tellers who thwarted a bank robber’s activities by becoming engrossed in its singular charms, Hangman consisted of two Battleship-style hidey-behindey units, which each contained a range of plastic tiles with letters on. With these, you could either create an impromptu mini-variation of Domino Rally by lining ‘em up and knocking ‘em over or, more boringly, slot into the spaces in the word as they were guessed.

The progress of the hangee was advanced by successive pre-drawn pictures on a dial, thus foiling the other pleasure of pre-pubescent wits - the endowment of the luckless individual with large primary sexual characteristics. Even more boringly, this MB version didn’t have the decency to incorporate a clockwork choking noise or anything when you won. We’ll take imagination over plastic any day.