Space-Ludo with Skaro-centric baddies

Arguably the most cumbersome feat of paper-and-plastic engineering, War Of The Daleks was played on a hollow card box-cum-board of roughly the same thickness as the average upholstered chair cushion. The game involved moving card figures of a nondescript early 1970s comic strip man around a circular playing area and trying to get to the centre whilst avoiding the Daleks.

With not a staircase in sight to impede their progress, the Daleks themselves were surprisingly faithful plastic renditions (in non-canonical silver/red and gold/blue colour schemes) that stood a good three quarters of an inch tall and were inserted into concentric slots cut into the board. When the even taller pale blue “control centre” in the middle of the game was rotated, the card disc underpinning these concentric slots also rotated, causing the Daleks to move around the board and subsequently “capture” hapless players (by touching them).

If your man made it to the centre, he could destroy the control centre simply by lifting it up, although so doing displaced four panels - three bore illustrations of bloody big explosions, but the fourth deployed a hitherto unknown King Dalek who could invalidate the entire game.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its ludicrous bulkiness, War Of The Daleks was massively popular but most of the sets that now find their way into second hand shops are invariably missing the odd Dalek or two, not to mention the all-important King Dalek panel which has often thoughtfully been replaced by a child’s felt tip drawing on a flimsy piece of lined paper.

A couple of years later came a straightforward Doctor Who game from the same company which, despite boasting a handful of cut-out Tom Bakers and a plastic TARDIS was an extremely boring and slow-moving affair. Insert your own joke about similarities to the Sylvester McCoy TV era here.