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Many board games–Othello springs to mind–usually bear a trite slogan on the side of the box along the lines of ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’. Surely then, the motto for Cascade was ‘A lifetime to set up, a minute to play’. But what a minute it was!

Made by mini-car kings Matchbox, Cascade was bizarrely addictive, totally pointless and definitively uncompetitive–one of those games where eventually no-one really played by the rules, a bit like just reading out the questions from Trivial Pursuit without the board.

See also Crossfire, KerPlunk, Domino Rally

So the set-up, then: an acid-yellow plastic mat had spaces marked out for the five pieces of Cascade furniture. At one end there was a towering Archimedes screw that sucked up ball-bearings and launched them off a short ski-ramp. Then came the bam-bam-bam bounce across three taut red timpani thingies, before the balls hit a mini-pinball table and fell into several scoring slots. Certain balls would be returned to the screw via a three-foot track for another go around the system. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen.

Of course, lest the gradient tolerance of your bedroom carpet be suboptimal, the little metal buggers would scatter to either side and roll under your bunk bed (we imagine Barnes Wallis felt similarly disheartened in that bit from The Dam Busters). The best improvement via improper game play was to put the launch tower on top of your wardrobe and let the balls really bounce. Constructing little obstacles between the trampolines, such as piled-up Subbuteo team boxes, would assist in efforts to test how high the ball-bearings would really go. A Mars-Staedtler rubber under the edge of each trampoline thingy helped angle them perfectly for extra distance too.

No-one had any idea what the scoring system was, but in the same way that someone can win ten grand on Better Homes without wielding so much as a staple gun, you could ‘win’ Cascade without any personal involvement whatsoever. And it was fun, so who cares?