Pig Mania

When Annette and her kids were here we played Pass the Pigs many times. I don't know if you're familiar with that game, so I'll tell you a little bit about it. To get the full story, though, we actually need to go back to the 1980's.

One of the games my family owned and loved playing when I was a kid was Pig Mania. (The game box says, "an original game of chance using pigs as dice.") The game came with two small pigs and you would roll them out on a table. You would get a certain amount of points depending on what position the pigs landed in. You would keep rolling until you either got "pig out" or "makin' bacon."

Pig out is where both pigs land on their side, but with legs that are in a different position (the pig has legs that are closer together on one side of their body and legs that are farther apart on the other side). If you rolled both pigs on their side and one of them had legs close together, and the other had legs far apart you would "pig out." You'd keep all of the points you'd racked up during your turn which would then be over. "Makin' bacon" is when both pigs are touching each other when they land. You lose all of the points you accumulated during your turn and you take a zero for your score that round. The winner is the one with the highest amount of points after a certain amount of rounds. I don't know if I'm explaining the game very well, but it's actually really fun.

I don't know what ever became of our Pig Mania game, but I imagine it eventually got worn out and thrown away since it got a lot of use. When I was a young teenager I missed our Pig Mania game and thought it would be fun to buy a new one, but I couldn't find it for sale anywhere. I found another game that looked similar to it (I can't remember what it was called) and I decided to give it a try. It turned out to be really disappointing, though. The pigs were too slippery and didn't roll well since and they always seemed to land in the same position. I decided to try again when I saw another Pig Mania-type game at the store called Pass the Pigs. The pigs were nice and rubbery and rolled the way the're supposed to.

When Kimball and Rebecah visited they found my old Pass the Pigs game (which surprised me since I'd forgotten about it and figured it was long gone). We had lots of fun playing it together, and it was funny to watch the kids play it.

I found this picture online of the Pass the Pigs game (which looks identical to the one I have). Several of the positions that the pigs can land in are also pictured.

Pig Mania/Pass the Pigs is a fun game that has lots of nostalgic memories from my childhood attached to it. (I'm pretty sure Amazon still sells a version of it.)