After a brief hiatus, Spin Again Sunday is back with a game that’s absolutely adorable. It’s also simple and safe, according to the box. Since one sort of expects a board game to be safe, perhaps its manufacturers are comparing it to a real pillow fight–we all know what bloodbaths those are.
This Week’s Game: Wow Pillow Fight Game for Girls. (It wouldn’t be proper to expose a boy to this game–the game pieces are wearing their PJs.)
Manufacturer: Milton Bradley.
Copyright Date: 1964. With unusual specificity, Milton Bradley notes that it holds the copyright “under Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions.”
Recommended Ages: 5 to 12.
Game Board: The board itself is simple, with pink stripes on one side and blue stripes on the other. Each side includes four rows of circles and a single circle near the center of the board.
Players erect a divider, styled like a bedroom wall, between the board’s two sides.
I love all the cute room decor details.
Game Pieces: Each player gets a set of six slumber party guests as pawns.
Each player also gets one “house mother.”
House mother? So these girls are in boarding school or something? I guess it’s better than calling her Grandma, since we’ll be hurling pillows at her.
Game pieces also include little pink and blue beds. Each player uses the bed that matches her side of the board.
The beds are actually little catapults for propelling pillows across the divider.
See how pushing down on the lever makes the mattress spring up? Unfortunately, my game came without a key element–the actual pillows.
Game Play: Players assemble their girls in the row at the board’s edge. The house mothers stand on the central circles near the divider.
Each player gets a spinner. On her turn, it tells her how many pillows she can hurl across the wall. It also offers chances to move her girls forward or backward on the board, or to steal an opponent’s girl.
The game object, of course, is to wipe out the other player’s entire team. The house mother has to be the last one standing–even if she is hit, she stays in the game until all the girls are gone. Then it’s open season on old ladies.
My Thoughts: This game is such a great mixture of cuteness and aggressiveness that it seems perfect for tween-age girls. I’m surprised that it didn’t become a girl-game classic. A better name might have helped.
Since my daughter is in the game’s target age range, I asked her to offer a review, too:
“Wow Pillow Fight is a very good and cute game. It is very detailed. Sometimes it can be kind of hard to hit the girls with the ‘pillows.’ The game company it is made by is Milton Bradley. We got ours off of Ebay. We used cotton balls as the pillows because ours did not come with pillows. I was the winner of the game–yay, me. I would give it 3 stars.”
Embarrassing Treasures 
This is adorable: “I was the winner of the game–yay, me.” What better endorsement could a game have?
If I were a kid with this game, it would last about three minutes before my brothers hijack it and use the beds to hurl metal balls or marbles at each other. I can just see it now.
I hadn’t thought of that, but I’m sure my brother would have done the same thing!
Awesome. Love all the playing pièces, the ‘House Mother’ seems to be wearing a similar housecoat to that which my Gran wore 🙂
My grandmother wore housecoats like that, too. They must have been universal!
I had this game as a girl – loved it! There was also a “Pow” Cannon game for boys. What memories!
Oooh, a Pow game–that explains everything. Wow, on its own, seemed like such a name for this game. Thanks for commenting and solving that mystery!