The Drawing Board

The following board game, which could probably not be published today, appeared in The Bash Street Kids Annual 1995:

That last page in particular has been really stuck in my head for the better part of three decades. I found "the spinny thing that rarely works", and advising the reader to just buy a dice instead, incredibly funny, have always referred to them as such since, and was very pleased to rediscover its origin when I bought this book in a charity shop the other week. I wondered why this childhood memory lodged itself in my mind so firmly, and I think it's because it was probably my first experience of a work taking the piss out of its own idea.

Including a fully playable board game was a staple of the Christmas books for many years; most of them play the 'game' mechanic more or less straight, although some show more ambition than others. There are some very dry takes on the concept with up to 200 squares and not much theming in some Fleetway annuals of the 70s, almost as if they were intended as a selling point to parents who wanted to keep their children quiet for a few hours.

I would also like to think that even at the time, I appreciated that artist David Sutherland had really gone the extra mile. The Bash Street Kids annuals were principally reprints of old strips from the weekly Beano with a smattering of new material -- he surely didn't need to produce a whole page of comic introducing the board game, or the whole page of photocopy-and-cut-out game pieces which I found so amusing. But he did anyway.

Another example of a Bash Street Kids board game I have a really clear memory of decades later can be found as the last image here, this one drawn by Bob Dewar in the Beano Book 1993. There is quite a bit of new BSK material by Dewar in that book, rather than Sutherland, and it's easy to think it might have originally been intended for that year's Bash Street Kids Annual and got moved for some reason. (Sutherland drew the vast majority of weekly strips from 1962 up until his death in January 2023, and the annuals frequently gave other D. C. Thomson artists the opportunity to provide their own take on the characters.) Maybe it was felt to be so good it deserved to be moved up to the higher-profile book, because that game in particular is one of my favourite things ever to appear in the Beano.