The early 1980s was in many ways the golden age of board games. Video games were still in their infancy, and for the most part, kids played board games. The fervor for same was stoked by an avalanche of commercials during Saturday morning cartoons. Supply and demand: as natural a combination as hippos and marbles.

Oh, didn't you know? It's true: the hippopotamus has an almost insatiable appetite for little white marbles. Num num!

The primary - perhaps only - appeal to the game Hungry Hungry Hippos was that it creates a godawful racket. A "your parents will regret birthing you" racket. A racket to rival a young Bart Simpson striding around the kitchen banging pots and pans singing "I am so great! I am so great!"

Take a big plastic pan. Station a plastic hippo at each corner of the pan. Put a lever on the back of the hippo: when you push down on the lever, the hippo's head moves forward, down, and then back, scooping up any marbles it happens to have trapped. The marbles go into a little catch pond inside each hippo.

Now give the whole thing a ridiculously neon bright color scheme, dump in a bag of white marbles, and watch the kids go to town!

I am one of the few children of the 1980s who actually owned this game. I think most parents were too wise to have bought one, or else they "accidentally" broke or lost the game. ("Sorry, son. I accidentally set fire to your Hungry Hungry Hippos and threw it out in the dumpster while doing a little jig.")

I can attest that yes: the game is preposterously loud. And super exciting! Seriously: this is one of the few things which really lived up to its commercial's promise. When you're slamming on that lever and the marbles are whacking around and your friend has that zestful gleam in their eye as they try to out-hippo you, it's a short road to shrieking.

It's a game which is custom designed to cause a frenzy. There is no skill involved. No higher thought at all, in fact. The best thing you can do to improve your score is to elbow your friend away from her post, so that you get a few extra grabs while she tries to regain her balance. It's pure primal greed, ideally paired with a sugar high.

This is definitely a situation where I have to wonder what my mother was thinking. I'm pretty sure someone else bought me the game as a gift. But why she let me keep it - much less play it - is a mystery. My mother was not, to my recollection, deaf. But you would have to be, to share a household with an active game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Sadly, my game slowly went the way of all Hungry Hungry Hippos: I eventually lost all the marbles. One or two at a time, and the next thing you know, your hippos are duking it out over three little marbles. And you couldn't just replace them with real marbles, either, because the originals were made of plastic. Real marbles had too much heft, and didn't bounce around nearly as well.

Rest in peace, my little marblevores!

Photo credit: Flickr/unloveablesteve