The Barnabas Collins game is the scariest!

Mrs. Cousin Barnabas and I played the famous Barnabas Collins board game a few months ago and ... it was a'ight. I'll give Milton Bradley credit for trying to invent a new game for the Dark Shadows merchandise empire, but the mechanics were a bit jerky and, as is almost always the case with table top games, the outcome is almost entirely a matter of chance. There's no skill needed to play it, but this's true for almost every board game.

Anyhoo, you can watch a television commercial for the game above, and it's an interesting piece of work. Not only does it appear to have been shot on the set of Collinwood, but Jonathan Frid and (what appears to be) Nancy Barrett make appearances. The game was a hot item when it was released, and so many were produced that it's still easy to find ... even more than 40 years later. For whatever reason, the "other" Dark Shadows game (the one that featured a cartoon that looked like Bela Lugosi on the package) is slightly more difficult to find.

I've included some vintage newspaper clippings from around 1969 from "Letters to Santa" features in local newspapers. It's kind of awesome to see Barnabas Collins and Santa Claus mentioned in the same paragraph.