Here we present, for your Father’s Day enjoyment, the best-worst online reviews of Don’t Wake Daddy. Well, when you put it that way, it’s probably fine. Then counting comes into it when pushing daddy’s alarm.” “Kids are challenged to match colors as well as complex designs. One fan praised “the educational aspects of the game”-not the education about death and authority and other facets of human misery, the education about numbers. To its credit, though, reviews are mostly positive. Is there anything scarier than a dead parent? Some reviewers reported Daddy wouldn’t wake up at all, forcing poor kiddos to confront their own mortality. There are “technical problems with Daddy”-which sounds like something straight out of horror fiction or a David Fincher film. When it doesn’t work, Daddy is caught in a haunted, broken bed that will never let him go back to sleep. In the rebellious kids-vs-adults marketing paradigm of the ’90s, is it any wonder that we loved roleplaying at breaking the rules? Some of us didn’t deserve our patient and loving parents, and we should call them more often.īut those are just the stories the game tells when it works. We don’t know what happens in between, so let’s choose to assume it’s just a reasonable conversation about boundaries in Daddy’s house.Ī more charitable (but still depressing) interpretation is that the kids are the antagonists, waking up their beleaguered, possibly single father, who only wants to get some sleep so he can function at the job that feeds their dog and buys them new roller skates and crap like that. What’s the punishment? It’s unclear, but it begins with Daddy ghoulishly springing up from his slumber-” as if just having awakened from a nightmare,” according to Wikipedia editors-and ends with the kids back in bed.

The suspense in the game derives from a mechanism where players push Daddy’s alarm clock and cross their fingers against the random chance that he’ll wake up to punish them for making noise. Some Amazon reviewers agree: It’s probably not great to teach kids to tiptoe around the whims of a patriarch with a hair trigger. In retrospect, this game is… a little uncomfortable. Sugarcoated nostalgia for the products of the ’90s has practically become a national pastime in the decade following the Great Recession, but the passage of time has not been too kind to Daddy. It was a board game with a simple premise: The kids are trying to get to the kitchen for a late-night snack without waking up their volatile, nightcap-clad father. Every ’90s kid™ remembers Don’t Wake Daddy, one of the hit toys of the 1992 Christmas season.

Dont wake daddy