Electric Aunt was a game played on the Game of Life board. A friend and I invented it back in adolescence days. Inspired by the square ‘Eccentric Aunt dies and leaves you 50 cats. Pay $10,000 to get rid of them.’ The electric aunt was an old TV tube—all TVs had many tubes, before the days of transistors, let alone semiconductors. The aunt took its own turn, after that of the regular players. It could move independently and zap anyone in a radius equal to its height. Today, due to sensitivity toward cats and maybe even aunts, that square was long ago renamed and you must pay $10,000 for some other reason.

‘Care to play a game of Electric Aunt?’ I asked my brother, after the cheating snot whomped me once again at Scrabble?