Codebreaking pegathon

It was always a slow Sunday at Grandma’s if the Mastermind had to come out. Invented in 1970 by an Israeli postmaster (aren’t they all?), the 1973 Game of the Year was more famous for its box than the contents. Sporting the mantra “Easy to learn. Easy to play. But not so easy to win”, the cover photo of later editions featured a wise old sage and his white-dressed assistant. Little did we know the sage in question was a Leicester hairdresser called Bill Woodward¹.

You all know the game - black pegs for right piece, wrong place and white pegs for right piece, right place (or was it the other way around?); advancing up the wood-effect board/box trying to work out the combination hidden behind your opponent’s shield; calculating the finite statistical probabilities of a four-colour code sequence. Gosh, doesn’t it even SOUND fun!?²

Far too many spin off versions abounded - Mini Mastermind, Travel Mastermind, Number Mastermind, Word Mastermind (with yellow letter-shaped pegs) and a bastard-hard version with extra sets of colours. Confusion reigns to this day between the board game and the no relation TV show, so when an (actually rather good) board game of the BBC quiz was released it had to be called MasterQuiz and likewise for the lamer, unofficial Spears Games effort Magnus Magnusson’s The QuizMaster.

¹Manufacturers Invicta reunited him with original box star Cecilia Fung in 2003 to celebrate the game’s thirtieth anniversary. Bill revealed that, during the original shoot, he was required to pose with a cat on his lap but the photos were abandoned when the moggy did what Frank Spencer referred to as “a whoopsie” on his trousers.
Today’s Mastermind is a quite terrifyingly complex-looking collection of acid coloured pegs, sliding levers and rotating combinations that would likely make us wet ourselves if we were to attempt to play it.