Scoop! Playing the Fleet Street reporting game

I found this fantastic board game Scoop - "by the makers of Monopoly" - in a charity shop in Camden Town.

Apparently the game dates backs to the 1950s, which is why the reporters are smoking cigarettes and pipes in the newsroom as depicted on the front of the box.

Scoop was a classic family board game in which every player was a Fleet Street reporter. The object is to fill the front page of a newspaper with the highest value stories.

Each player gets a newspaper front page to fill. You can choose from the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph, The Times, and even the sadly folded News Chronicle and Daily Sketch.

It also comes with what is described as "an intriguing telephone device"- a cardboard cut out of an old Bakelite phone in which you phone the editor to get the thumbs up or down for your story.

Talking of intriguing telephone devices, maybe Waddington's could revive Scoop in an updated version called Hacked in which national newspaper reporters go directly to jail if they're caught listening to voice mail messages on celebrities' phones.