20 board games from the '90s you totally forgot about

Girl Talk is a quintessential '90s board game. It remained so popular that in the '00s, new editions were made, like That’s So Raven Girl Talk and Hannah Montana Girl Talk. 

Chutes and Ladders was so simple yet so fun. There was nothing more exciting than landing on the square that took you up the tallest ladder on the board, and there was nothing more devastating than taking the longest slide back to the bottom. 

If you forgot about Don’t Wake Daddy, it was probably on purpose. This bizarre game was like low-stakes Russian roulette and came with a Jack-in-the-box-like father in bed who would pop up if you stepped on chips or rode a bike through the house while he was sleeping. 

Pretty Pretty Princess was the ultimate game for little girls who loved dressing up. The purpose was to gather all the jewels in your color, as well as the crown, and you got to wear them while playing. A dream. 

The best thing about '90s board games is that so many of them were either needlessly complicated or so simple they seemed stupid. Hungry Hungry Hippos was the latter, but aggressively trying to grab marbles with a plastic hippo was an absolute blast. 

Dream Phone probably lost popularity because its prime demographic started using actual phones. Anyone with an edition of Dream Phone in prime condition needs to donate it to a nostalgia museum to remind everyone of simpler times. 

Having to set traps for actual mice is not fun, but pretending to be a mouse and evading elaborate plastic traps is awesome. This game entertained people long before the '90s, but it gives off '90s energy, and therefore that decade claims it. 

13 Dead End Drive was a knock-off Clue that was meant to be for kids (even though kids are totally capable of playing Clue). It was bizarre, a little creepy, and quite unnecessary if you already owned Clue, but it was lots of fun. 

Board games are instantly more intriguing when they include an onomatopoeia in their names. KerPlunk is a low-stakes concept that makes for high-stakes playing. It’s so simple but intense. 

Don’t Break the Ice was fun for about 10 minutes. Pounding on the ice and trying to keep your man up was enjoyable, but setting the game up for a new round after the ice was broken was a pain in the you-know-what. 

Guess Who was fun to play in the '90s, and it’s fun to play today. New editions are sold, and ‘90s and ‘00s kids on TikTok have made a version where players describe their people subjectively, and it’s a whole vibe. 

Mall culture was so pervasive in the late '80s and early '90s that someone had to bottle and sell it. People still play Mall Madness today, they just do the real-life version of it and call it shopping. And that is also loads of fun. 

The great thing about trivia is that it can always be repackaged and sold. And that’s exactly why Cranium became popular. It’s just a different form of trivia. If you didn’t play Cranium in the '90s or '00s, you probably played another version of it because it had dozens of spin-offs. 

The game Crackers in My Bed seems like the brainchild of a frustrated mother who didn’t know how to stop her child from sneaking food into their bedroom. Although the game is no longer in production, carb lovers across the United States will always remember it.  

Titanic: The Board Game was wholly unnecessary. We already had the devastating movie about the sinking ship. Why add more sorrow to our lives via board game? It unsurprisingly hasn’t had the legacy of games like Monopoly and Candy Land. 

Again, making a board game about the sinking of Titanic after the movie was released did not need to happen, but not making a Jumanji board game in tandem with the movie just would’ve been poor marketing. 

Pizza parties are so much fun someone wanted to keep things going with a board game. The only issues with Pizza Party are that it’s not much fun for adults, and there isn’t any actual pizza involved. If you’re choosing between playing pizza party or throwing one, pick the latter. 

The concept of Mystery Mansion is hilarious because you go through all the trouble of building a new house only for it to be old, dirty, and creepy. But whoever thought to have a Scooby Doo edition of this game knew exactly what kids wanted back in the day. 

The pimple-popper games of today need to thank Gooey Louie and his perpetual congestion for their contributions to the game world. Gooey Louie walked so acne-ridden plastic heads could run. 

Throughout the '90s, game makers were either recycling old great board games or creating ridiculous new games, like Crocodile Dentist. Despite being such a strange idea, Crocodile Dentist was so popular that it had a travel-sized version.