Don’t Wake the Dragon!

If you happen to get your hands on some Chernobyl energy drinks and find yourself in a Hot Tub Time Machine, you’ll have a most excellent time sliding back to 1986: the year of the dragon!

This was the year of Top Gun, Invisible Touch, and the Internet Message Access Protocol. Reagan was talking arms with Gorbachev, Halley’s Comet was traveling through our solar system, and Parker Brothers was rolling out the shakin’, quakin’ 3-D action game, Don’t Wake the Dragon!

Don’t Wake the Dragon! was a radical roll-and-move children’s game featuring an all-star cast of egg-obsessed penguins, a big purple dragon named Big Snore, and four mechanically shaking icebergs.

2-4 players move their penguins around the icebergs to retrieve eggs stolen by Big Snore and bring them back to their nest. If your penguin happens to land on a dragon space, you have to press the “dragon waker” button and one or more of the icebergs will shake at random! If your penguin falls off, you gotta return your egg to the sleeping dragon and move back to the nearest safe space.

This game is most fun with four players, and I recommend rolling the dice like you would at a craps table. Avoid each dragon space like it’s Boardwalk with four hotels on it, and if you have to press the “dragon waker” button, do a little ancy-dance and utter, “please, please, please!” as you bite your finger nails – this game has you praying not to fall off!

Some victorious dragoners have gone on to be very successful at avoiding their own parents, escaping through bedroom windows and clearing past their girlfriends’ fathers; expertly sneaking out after all night make-out sessions and getting past late-night security guards. If you roll your dice right and practice dragons often, you too can have these advanced cloaking skills and more!

Here’s the original television commercial thanks to xbeatrushx‘s YouTube channel and the original instruction manual thanks to Hasbro.com. Enjoy!