There’s always your 10,000th post. At your rate you should get there by about, oh, say September 2005. 
At my rate of posting it’ll take me five more years to reach 5K. : sigh :
Sorry, but I have nothing new to contribute to the thread. I was teased, picked on, abused, etc. by my classmates enough as it was, so I went out of my way to avoid getting roped into playing such games.
Duck-Duck-Goose is the one I remember most vividly. Everyone would sit in a circle as ducks while a child appointed as It would walk around and around, tapping everyone on the head and saying, “Duck (tap), duck (tap), duck (tap), GOOSE!”
Then the “goose” would leap up and try to catch It before he/she reached her spot. If the “goose” caught him/her, then the “goose” became It and had to do the walk-around business. If not, then the It would continue with the “duck, duck, goose” until someone caught him/her.
Catholic school in the 80s here…
We played a lot of ragtag soccer (co-ed), four square (just us chickies), and keep-away (mostly boys, but a few of us girls joined in).
But the big one for the girls from about 4th to 6th grade was jacks. Did no one else play this? I had a beautiful red ball that was just a bit hollow in the middle and gave absolutely perfect jumps. Not too high, not too soft. Whoever won got to claim their opponents ball–although promises of future “cuts” or lunchroom snacks were often substituted.
We called that one Crack the Whip here in the Mid-Atlantic. If the teachers caught us playing it, they’d make us stop. The big meanies.
Let’s see…Northern California, mid 1980’s, extraordinarily small town and school (town population approximately 850, school population approximately 120 kids K-5?)
Aside from those already mentioned, I remember playing jump rope(especially two people using one rope at the same time), double dutch, and Chinese jump rope. In fifth grade, even the boys did Chinese jump rope.
Chinese Jump Rope was played using a long elastic loop, kind of like a giant rubber band covered in fabric. Two people would stand in it making a rectangle shape (rope around the ankles), and one person would jump in and out of it, making patterns with their feet and the rope. I remember the chanting sequence went, “One two three four, in, out, diamonds and ON”. If you got them all, the holders would move the rope up to their mid-calf and you’d have to do the same. If you still got them all, they’d move it to the knees. If then, they’d move it back down to the ankles and one would take a foot out, making a triangle shape. Then the progression up the legs. Then the other would take the foot out so there would only be an ankle width between the two main parts of the rope. I don’t remember what happened if you got EVERYTHING. I do remember that if you missed one or did it incorrectly, you had to replace one of the holders and then the next person got to try.
Also in elementary school, we played the aforementioned tetherball, dodge ball, and four-square. I also remember people playing handball, which was kind of like raquetball except without the raquets. Basically, you bounced a ball against a backstop piece and tried to do it hard enough so the person you were playing against couldn’t grab it and hit it to bounce it on your side.
We also did “Friday flip-up day” (if you were a girl, you desperately tried to remember not to wear a skirt or dress on Friday), boys chased girls into the bathroom and vice versa, and lots of girls spent many recesses doing one-legged and two-legged flips around the bars on the Big Toy. We played a version of King of the Mountain, but it was in a nylon rope net, everyone would climb it and one person at the top would try to keep them from displacing him/her. When the person at the top fell, the net would catch him/her.
There was a thing girls were doing for a while where we used yarn and did a kind of finger-weaving. I think that’s where my interest in doing crafty things with my hands started. I made a garland for Christmas one year for my mom doing finger weaving. I was also in elementary school during the heyday of Garbage Pail Kids ™ and there was a lot of trading of said cards going on in third through fifth grade.
Too fun! Okay, um…public elementary school - Florida (enuff said, huh?) in the 70s.
When I was in first and second grade I we (boys & girls alike) played a game called “TV Tag”. Similar to other “chase” games. It’s been so long I forget the rules. Anyone heard of it? You had to yell out the name of a TV show, I think you were either “frozen” by the “it” tagger or you were “unfrozen” if you said a TV show, I don’t remember. dammit.
Where’s that Homer line when you need it…about learning new stuff and old stuff gets pushed out…harumpf!!
Eastern Ontario, late 70’s, early 80’s, Separate School.
I remember playing British Bulldog and Red Rover quite a bit. Mostly guys would play, but some of the “tough” girls would join in too. We also played tag, in many varieties (regular, ball, freeze, TV).
We often had piggy back fights too. Everyone would pair up, and one guy would climb on the other guy’s back. They’d then go around, trying to knock the other teams top guy off. I was the biggest kid in my grade so I was very popular for this one, since I could carry my partner the longest.
Sports cards were popular as well, although being good Canadians, we used hockey cards instead of baseball cards. Foot hockey was also very big - basically soccer played with a tennis ball, but again, we were good Canucks and called it foot hockey.
One thing that baffles me now that I look back on it - we had a great playground at my school, and it included large wooden platform that was about 8 feet off the ground. In the middle of this was a big, square hole! Needless to say, there was probably one kid every week who wasn’t paying attention and fell through the hole to the ground below. A few years after I left, they took the whole thing down.
South Carolina, early-mid 80’s, public and private school.
You guys made me go try to make one of those eight sided fortune tellers. I couldn’t quite get it, so I made a paper football instead.
Does anybody remember the complicated “slap games” girls used to play? There was a rhyme (I remember “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black” and, um, how did it go? “Hello, Operator, give me number 9, and if you can’t connect me, something something kick your behind the 'fridgerator…”), and compliated hand movements that went with it. There were two-person and four-person variants.
We also played things like “Old Kentucky Fair”, where you got in a circle with one person in the middle, and you sang, I think I remember this one:
I went to Old Kentucky
The Old Kentucky Fair
I met a senorita
With flowers in her hair
Shake it, Senorita,
Shake it if you can
Shake it like a milkshake
And do the best you can!
Rumble to the bottom,
Rumble to the top
Turn around and turn around until I holler stop!
S-T-O-P Stop!
The girl in the middle would dance, and during the “turn around” part she would close her eyes and point while the group revolved around her, and whoever she pointed at was the next “senorita”. We played that a lot.
Also Red Rover, the goal of which I believe was to break somebody’s arm. They always ran at me. I’ve never been strong.
In middle school, we played endless games of cards - I remember Spit, Slap, and Egyptian Ratscrew we played for hours and hours and HOURS.
Just for you, Zsofia:
Jump rope and hand-clapping rhymes.
“Say, say, oh playmate” was always my favorite.
The interesting thing is, I’ve never heard of any of their “hand-clapping rhymes”. The hand-clapping rhymes we used are under their “jump rope” section. Wierd, yes?
I remember the girls on the block singing this. Imagine my shock when I hear my 5 and 7 year old daughters singing it just last weekend:
I’m surprised no one has mentioned marbles yet. Round about 3rd grade seemed every kid in school had a bag full of them. We played two versions.
[ol]
[li] A golf like version where you had a small hole dug and you tried to shoot it into the whole with the smallest amount of shots.[/li][li] Maybe it was called cracks where you have to hit your opponents marble with yours so many times. If you hit them you got another turn. I remember a move called cherry bomb where you stood above your opponents marble, held you marble close to your eye and tried to drop it straight on to the other marble.[/li][/ol]
I still got my marbles. Even a bumble bee and some ball bearings. Oh how we loved ball bearings. The biggeset goal was always to crack your opponents marbles.
As for those tackel the person as they try and get across the yard, I was always the Fat Albert guy. Not fat just very tall and hard to take down. I’d often end up with 4 or 5 little guys desperately holding on to me as I dragged them across the yard
We used to do that too, only on the ice rink while we were wearing skates. (They’d flood our playground every winter for an ice rink; we’d often be told to bring our skates for gym class, and we could always skate after school too if we liked.) I’m surprised more kids weren’t permanently injured this way; the kids at the end of the whip would be going dangerously fast when the whip cracked, and would find themselves heading uncontrollably towards snowbanks or hockey boards or other kids. Of course, this was Number 1 on the list of Banned Playground Games, but somehow we managed to do it anyway.
We also had a game we called Gunch. It was played with a football, and the idea was to grab the ball and hang onto it for as long as possible while everybody else tried to tackle you. When you were successfully brought down, and the ball pried from your grasp, you could join in the chase, tackle the new ball carrier, and try to get the ball again. Kind of pointless, now that I look back at it–the game was impossible to win–but I remember we’d play Gunch until we were all nearly dead from exhaustion.
That’s good to know! 
“Crack the Whip” was called Motorboat, I think, in the '70s my Midwestern city (Canton, OH) grade school; not dense neighborhood, more like suburban really. Or, maybe it wasn’t, I remember my friend Angela playing it with me4 and some of her friends a few times - and it would start out real slow, then they’d say “Motorboat, motorboat, go so fast” and really speed up. However, maybe that was just a variation.
I’m legally blind, so I didn’t play a lot of games, mostly threw a ball around, some kickball, some running & tag games, but nothing rough. I also remember kids asking me all these trivial things like to name the Presidents in order, all of which I knew since I was the class brain.
Ah, those were fun times, despite the teasing, and the kids in my class trying to get me to explain the birds and the bees to them, b/c they figured I knew that stuff. (I managed to evade their questions quite well
Smear the Queer definitely. I played it mostly when I was in my early teens, so of course we all knew what queer meant. You’ll forgive me for not having any righteous indignation and refusing to play one of the best games ever. Usually games with simple rules aren’t fun, but when there’s tackling involved, the less rules the better.
How about slaps?
There were two kinds, regular slaps, and the more vicious western slaps. Both were reflex games for two players.
The regular flavor was played with the first person (the slapper) holding both hands out in front of them, palms up. The second (the slappee) would place their hands palms down on top of the slapper’s hands. The object was for the slapper to bring one or both hands out from under the slappee’s hands and slap him or her on top of their hands. The slappee could evade the slapper by pulling his hands straight back. If the slappee successfully evaded the slapper, he or she became the slapper.
The more vicious western style was played similarly, except that the slappee held their hands clasped together in front of them, palms together, thumbs up. The slapper put his hands on his hips, like a cowboy ready to quickdraw. The slapper then tried to bring one or the other hand around and slap the back of the slappee’s hands, while the slappee evaded the slapper by opening his or her hands in a scissor type motion.
Neither version actually kept any score or anything. The more vicious western style allowed for a much better swing and follow thru, and could be quite painful. It led to some serious redness of the backs of the hands. IIRC, in the 7th grade the problem of red hands became so severe that the game was banned in my school.
I was a girl in the Pacific Northwest in the early 80s at a public suburban elementary school. A number of the schools in the area had been built by “California architects” (or so the rumor went) and they hadn’t taken into consideration that it rains frequently. So we had flat roofs (that leaked and spilled over), a lot of outdoor open spaces, and very few covered areas. Unless it was absolutely pouring out, we were generally shoved outside into the wet anyway for recess.
A lot of things that have already been mentioned - jump rope, Chinese jump rope (mlerose someone esle remembers that!), four-square, the hand clapping games, fortune tellers and MASH, jacks, and chinese jacks (they were little plastic rings about the size of dimes. you would loop a bunch around a single middle ring (sort of like keys on a key chain), and then play a game where you had to do a bunch of steps with the jacks (throwing them and catching them, with various hands in various orders) in a row, exactly right - or you would lose. The winner would get the jack of her choice from each of the losers.). The good thing about those is they could be played under the awnings without getting soaked.
On drier days, kickball or capture the flag (we took capture the flag very seriously, not the kind in the forest, but the kind on a soccer field.) on the red field, tetherball, statue maker (someone would fling all but one of their friends around then arrange them in various poses and then sell them to the left over friend), various games of tag on the playground equipment, and of course amateur gymnastics on the bars. I had thick, thick calluses on my hands all the way through elementary school from sitting on the bars and going around and around and around and around, backwards and forewards, and the competition of who could do the most times in what position with various amounts of holding on. We would occasionally fling ourselves off (cherry drops and suicide drops) but we weren’t technically allowed to do that, so we had to make sure no one was watching.
Road hockey. Endless games of road hockey. There was a pick up game of road hockey every week, and if there wasn’t, all you had to do is go around the neighbourhood, knocking on people’s doors while holding a hockey stick.
And then there was Tiger. It was a great game. It started off simple enough. There was a Tiger. His goal was to tag everyone else in a round. Anyone he tagged also became a Tiger. The last to be tagged was the Tiger for the next round. Things got more complicated when we started playing really late and wearing dark clothing. At 10:00 at night, you couldn’t see anybody if they hid well. The game also developped an odd game-in-the-game: The round didn’t start until the Tiger heard one of the other players make a sound. So it soon reached the point where half of the fun was coming up with funny things to say to wake up the Tiger.
Anyone survive the game called Buck-Buck, or Johnny-on-the -pony?. One kid stood with his back up against the wall, another kid, bent at the waist, put his right shoulder aginst the wall kid’s stomach. Several others, also bent at the waist, wrapped their arms around the waist of the kid in front of them. Then the fun begins[ OH, Really, you say ]. Your friends, one at a time, jump onto your backs, the first jumper getting as close to the wall kid as possible. After supporting 10, 12, I don’t know how many kids, everyone collapsed onto the ground. The jumpers then became the framework for the next round. No score that I can remember, just lots of groaning and sore muscles and backs everafter.