Miniluuppi

This game was published in Finland at the dawn of information technology to show people what it was all about. The game board shows what would have then been a state-of-the art computer room; an input to the left, ie. card readers where the players start from, with lines running via disk storage to the central processor, from which data is sent to the matrix printers at the output on the right. In the middle, as flavour graphic, the operator is inserting a reel of magnetic tape into a magnetic tape data storage unit. The idea is to get your 'program' (set of pawns of the same colour) from your punch card reader through the CPU and into the printers, preferably your own as it nets more points - but pawns may end up in other people's printers too, giving them points, and being the one who ends the game by getting all of their pawns into the printers gives a good bonus too. A 'random colour generator' (turning disc built into the game board) at the CPU tends to mess things up however, as it may send the player on a loop (which the second part of the name of the game, 'luuppi', refers to) within the CPU, or to an opponent's printer. Winner is the player with most points from all parts of their program at game end.

(The 'Mini' in the name of the game presumably refers to a minicomputer, which was the next step up from the single-user microcomputer just becoming available to the public; large operators such as banks and government agencies would own their own mini-computer to which various users would connect via terminals, using 'computing time' allocated to them.)