Candy Land
Draw a color, move to the color — no reading, no counting, no mercy when the card sent you all the way back down the rainbow trail. Candy Land was almost everyone's very first board game, and the world it happened in (King Kandy! Queen Frostine! Gramma Nutt!) was pure sugar.
Candy Land has one of the best origin stories in toys: it was designed in 1948 by Eleanor Abbott, a schoolteacher recovering from polio in a San Diego hospital, who created the game for the children on her ward — kids who needed a world to escape into and a game that asked nothing of them but knowing their colors. Milton Bradley published it in 1949, reportedly as a temporary fill-in for its school-supplies line. It became the company's best-selling game. The design is quietly brilliant: no reading, virtually no counting, no decisions at all — just draw a card and travel a winding track of 134 colored spaces, which makes it the first board game countless people ever played.
Here's the twist most players don't know: the Candy Land characters are younger than the game by a generation. For its first 35 years the board was simply a candy-colored path; the cast arrived in 1984, when — the same year Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley — Landmark Entertainment Group revamped the game with new artwork and an actual storyline, a quest to find King Kandy, the lost king of Candy Land, populated by Queen Frostine, Gramma Nutt, Lord Licorice and company. That 1984 world is the one 90s kids grew up in, mobbed with sweet-toothed royalty and the agony of drawing the card that yanked you backward within sight of the Candy Castle.
The game's strangest cultural moment came from the early internet. In the mid-90s an adult-entertainment company registered candyland.com and put a sexually explicit site on it; Hasbro sued, and in February 1996 a federal court granted an injunction forcing the content down — one of the first legal fights over an internet domain name ever, with a children's board game improbably at the center of it. Candy Land itself has never slowed: more than 50 million copies sold, still moving about a million a year, still the game where a four-year-old can beat you fair and square.
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