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Don't Break the Ice
Synopsis of Toy
Milton Bradley's Operation wasn't the only kid's game that took a 'very steady hand.' In Don't Break the Ice, manual dexterity was also requisite, and there were some unfortunate consequences for any butterfingers out there. There was nobody laid out on the operating table, but there was a cute little plastic guy who was perched comfortably atop a plastic glacier of ice blocks. If a player hammered at the blocks indelicately or not-so-strategically, said plastic guy would plummet down to the ground-left to his own devices amid broken piles of arctic debris. And no, a life probably wasn't going to be lost like it might have been in Operation , but the iceman would certainly have gotten pretty beat up.and it was darn chilly down there too.
Through the 1960's, toy company Schaper had a couple of kooky games to their credit: Don't Break the Ice, Don't Spill the Beans, Ants in the Pants , Cootie and Voodoo among them. Some have since fallen by the wayside, but Don't Break the Ice, now over thirty years old, can still be found on the toy store shelves today. Little kids-three year-olds and up-are welcome to play, because the parts are all plastic and none are small enough to step on or to really contemplate putting into your mouth. And if you're an older kid and your ego's been beaten up lately and you need an easy win, then little kids are the best opponents to wrangle, because these are hammerers who haven't quite learned the art of delicacy yet.
Don't Break the Ice comes with one game frame, a cache of thirty-three white plastic ice blocks, two plastic mallets and a little iceman or polar bear, depending on the year the game was issued. Just arrange the blocks in the frame (turning the frame over and laying them out upside down was easiest), set the frame on its legs and then take turns tapping away. Patience, a nice light touch and a little sympathy for whoever was perched atop that barren freeze-these were the only requisite skills for an Icebreaker. You'd better have them too, because there was nothing worse than that heavy feeling of responsibility that came with watching the blocks come crashing down, the iceman somewhere among them. Unless you need to pound those plastic ice blocks for therapeutic release reasons, please tap carefully.