I think I’ve only played hopscotch twice in my life - it bored me. I played tag (regular and TV), red light/greenlight, Simon Says, tetherball, foursquare, capture the flag, Red Rover, jump rope (I just could never get the hang of double dutch) MASH, and the folded up paper thing(I don’t think we called it a cootie catcher though). Anyone else remember The Spades? It was a pretty complex hand slapping game “The spades go eeny meeny
Pepsikeeny
Alla boobilenie
Atcha catch liberacha
Say the magic word…”
That’s all I can remember. Then there’s the classics like Miss Mary Mack. Back then we had jelly shoes and jelly bracelets (which are making a comeback now with teenagers associated with a disturbing sex game) Maybe that’s why I didn’t do hopscotch because jumpin in jelly shoes killed.
In my town, we called this Butt-Ball. I’m laughing just thinking about it… Only difference was only one select player got the chance to throw the ball at you. Typically, some future baseball pitching star was given the honor. Ouch!
This was in 6th grade at a public middle school in an upper middle class suburb of Boston.
One game our school had was carems (not sure how it’s spelled). It’s basically like a combination of pool, golf, and pinball. There are little plastic rings, and long wooden sticks you use to hit them similiar to how you hit pool balls. Along the board there are various obstacles along with green areas, numbered 1 through 8. You had to shoot your carem into the green areas in order, which meant bouncing it off obstacles and even your opponent’s carem. I was never athletically inclined so I ended up playing this a lot on the playground. Anyone else know what I’m talking about?
Wow, I do know about those. While the school never had them (some apprehension about pool cues and little rings in the hands of schoolchildren, I bet) the rec center at the public park had several sets. There were mazes, bowling, mini-shuffleboard, and more. I don’t recall a name for them (we called 'em “that ring-pool thing” and the supervisors knew what we meant), but carom sounds right.
We called this appropriately Red Ass.
16 year old male from Ontario here, we also played
Handball, Footsies (basically try to stomp on someone’s foot), all sorts of tags, Cops and Robbers, foot hockey, King of the Hill, general wrestling, Bloody Knuckles, catch, and sadly enough, POGS.
Also I think MASH is some kind of international thing, I went to Sri Lanka a few years and saw kids playing MASH there- which sort of surprised me.
Jail Break - I thought everyone played that! We used to have a front yard with one of those low 1-1/2 foot fences around it and that was the jail. One person would be the jailer, usually the fastest runner, and they would have to catch everyone else. The bounderies were one city block, and you could hide anywhere, but not in buildings. Once they tagged you, you were caught and you had to go inside the fence, and you couldn’t leave until someone else who hadn’t been tagged yet came and tagged you out (jail break).
Stickball, of course, in the middle of the street.
Skitch - which was when you grabbed the back of a car or bikek while wearing your roller skates and hung on. My sister let go at an inopportune time and was covered in scabs for months.
Spin the bottle - Where you spun a pop bottle and had to kiss whom ever it pointed to. Cool if they were cute, not so cool if they were fugly.
Garage Jumping - Climb one garage in the alley, then try to jump from one to the other, all the way down the block. Much fun, till that old man came out with a shotgun “GET OFF MY GARAGE!!!” and I jumped and ruined my ankles forever. Ouch.