Do any of you have a favourite game that you used to play as a kid? It could be indoors or outdoors.
My outdoor favourite game was rock hide and go seek. It was played similar to hide and seek but there was no tagging people. The person who was IT would have to throw a “rock” (it was usually a newspaper in a plastic bag) and then run to it and count to ten while everyone else ran off as fast as they could to hide. The person who was IT would then have to find the people and say “I see you suchandso” where the suchandso was the specific other child’s name. If the person who was IT was wrong about the name he was IT again but if he was right they had to race back to the “rock” which worked as a base. Anyway, if the person who was IT got there first that person had to sit by the “rock” and hope he would get saved by one of the other people. If the person who was IT lost the race, the other person could say “For all my family” and set all the people free. The game would last until all the people were caught and then the first person caught would be IT or if they were all saved the person who was IT would be IT again. I loved that game.
As for indoor games, I really liked playing the floor is filled with alligators or acid which just meant that you had to hop from pieces of furniture without touching the ground and see how far throughout the house you could go. The best part was avoiding getting caught by those wicked parents.
We had huge front lawns in our neighborhood, so we would play shadow tag. It worked best if half the lawn was in shadow & half in daylight. You would run around in the shadow part, careful not to let your shadow be seen in the sunlit part. If it was and your shadow got “tagged” (usually stomped on), you were then it.
Building tents both indoors and out was fun, and we would also construct haunted houses in hallways. Best thing about those was an old Disney record (a 45, I think) that was like a “soundtrack” from the Haunted House ride at Disneyland. It must have had a book with it too. But it was so cool!
Oh my God, Sqrl, you just caused a childhood flashback. My siblings and I used to try to circle our family room without touching the floor all the time. We had this atrocious red patio carpeting that we pretended was lava.
As for outdoor games, we usually played Kick the Can. Sort of the same concept as you described above, but when a “sekkee” was found by a “seeker,” the sekee had to outrace the seeker to the home base (a tin can, naturally) and kick it before he was tagged. We had about 20 kids the same age on our block, so the game took forever. Great fun.
Yep, sometimes it was lava too. We would take the couch cushions off and use them like stepping stones and fight eachother for them. Sometimes we would also try to see how few steps with the cushions(ie we would jump real far) it would take to get to a safe zone located rather far away.
My younger sisters and I would also play kamikaze bean bag where we would throw a bean bag chair across the room and dive off onto it from the sofa. I can’t tell you how many of those we broke that way. We could never play that one when our parents were home though. They could take a surprisingly brutal beating before busting. (How is that for alliteration?)
Flashlight tag. More like “hide and go seek” But here’s how it was played: The person who was it had a flashlight (the game had to be played at night) and everyone else hid. Then “it” had to find someone, shine the flashlight on them, and say their name. Wrong name, and they get to go free. We used to play all the time.
War. We had a great War playground, whereby there was one ‘fort’ on top of a large sand dune (and thus easy to defend and hard to take) and another fort on an island in the swamp through the forest. The island had a bridge to it that we constructed (and by bridge I mean stones and boards thrown into the water so we could walk across the swamp) and thus was also a great place to defend. The object was to capture the enemies fort. If you got shot (which involved having someone with a gun-shaped stick point it in your direction and shout “BANG-BANG I GOT YOU”) you had to lie down with your eyes closed, count ten Mississippi’s, and then go back to your home base before you could shoot again. This was a GREAT way to spend a Saturday.
Matchbox cars. We used to play for hours in the dirty patch next to our house making little towns and pretending all the people in town were driving around. Was a great time.
Lego’s. Lego’s were the perfect toy. I loved them. Not enough can be said about how cool Legos are.
Legos rock! We played with them all the time as kids. I still have a whopping huge bucket of 'em at my parents house. The cool part is now I get to buy them for my own kids. We’re starting to amass a nice collection. Though now I have also come to understand my mother’s curses over the things. Ever step on one in bare feet in the middle of the night? Oh, God–the pain…
We would play guns all the time (boom boom you’re dead) A friend of mine’s dad had a real neat woodshop so we could make all sorts of neat guns.
I now play paintball
In my even younger years my dad worked in a box factory and we’d have all the boxes one might ever need. We (my sister and I) would place them end to end and make all sorts of tunnels throughout the house, out on the porch, through the backyard, etc.
We played this weird game were there were two teams and a couple of kids would make all sorts of clues and missions for the teams to accomplish the winning team was the one who finshed first or did not die (imaginatively speaking of course).
The missions were cool, first person a plant camera in special spot then person b pickup camera left by person a who is off doing something else by now and snap picture of deep space satelite dish etc.
Inside my brother and I covered our enormous basement floor with a lego civilization. Perhaps five years in the making, this sweeping plastic drama explored the ascent of man from castles, to towns, to space…coincidentally like the three lego systems of the day. <s>
Outside we played War. Lots of War. Sometimes we even called it Narcs, imagining that the good guys were the DEA and the bad guys were running drugs from Bogota. How much things have changed. I still have memories of some glorious neighborhood games. Man, we were tactitians back then.
There has to be more than this. You people can’t be that boring. Well, I can’t imagine anyone not having a favourite game that they liked to play when they were growing up unless their parents kept them chained in the basement or something.
Oh, the chained-in-the-basement game! Did anyone else’s parents play this with you? Ah, I can remember the madcap times as if it were yesterday…Fighting the rats for the scraps of food my folks would throw down the cellar stairs, clawing with my fingers at the cruel iron shackels, waiting in anticipation for that one moment when the sun would filter through the crack and bathe my anguished face with its soothing warmth…
Hey, I still do this–in the IFGS we call it a “physical challenge encounter”. We get to add balance beams and tightropes to the setup–and get attacked. Loads of fun!
I loved playing a swashbuckler version of War–padded sticks for swords (I’ve never liked guns), three hits and you’re out. I’m still doing that, too. Guess who refuses to grow up!
Our favorite outdoor home games were kickball and Olympics.
Street kickball: First and third bases are parked cars, home and second are piles of dirt we dumped in the street. “Car!” Kickball was better than baseball as you didn’t need a catcher or basemen – just a pitcher and a couple of fielders. Throw the ball at the runner to get him out.
Olympics: We would hold Olympic events every summer, including the driveway dash, round-the-block run, high and long jumps, frisbee discus throw, bowling ball put (when dad wasn’t home), pole vault (mattresses dragged outside to land on; when mom wasn’t home), and the trash can hurdles.
Our favorite blacktop games at school were Termite and Kill the Guy with the Ball.
Termite: The two triangle shapes at the ends of the painted parking spaces were bases. Initially, one kid is the termite. Everyone else is at one of the bases, and must run to the other base when the termite yells something (probably “Termite” but I don’t remember.) The termite then tries to catch kids while they’re running, and if you’re caught, you become a termite. Eventually, everyone gets caught, and the kid who lasts the longest without getting caught wins.
Kill the Guy with the Ball is basically football with no teams, every player for himself. Starts in the middle of the lot, with everyone in a circle around the ball. The object is to get the ball to one of the bases without getting the crap beat out of you.
“Kill the Guy with the Ball.” Hey–we did this, too. I used to love it! We didn’t have bases or any kind of well-established goal. The guy with the ball just ran around and tried to not get tackled. As soon as he was creamed, he would toss the ball in the air and someone else would grab it. We always called it “Tackle the Bum.” It has kind of a jaunty early '30s ring to it.
We also played “kill the guy with the ball” but we called it “smear the queer” where the queer was whoever had the ball. We also played king of the mountain which was pretty much just a free for all on top of the biggest snow pile we could find. I always remember forming alliances and making deals and such that would last all of 3 minutes.
We used to play Guerrilla Tag. Also a Hide-and-Seek type game. You start with one IT. As soon as he tags some one, there are two ITs. They team up and go after the rest of the hiders. Everyone who gets tagged is an IT, until there are basically, like ten ITs chasing one hider. The cool thing about it was our boundries, which consisteed of one entire block in our town, which included a school and a K-Mart loading bay. It was a very small rural town, but it seemed like the gritty city to us.
We also used to “play” S.W.A.T. It was basically role-playing. Everybody assumed a character from the TV series of the same name (every one always wanted to be T.J. the sniper, he was the coolest). We would gather in my friend’s shed, a.k.a. Headquarters. Whoever was playing Hondo would announce a call, at which time we’d tear ass through the neighborhood whooping our siren calls. We’d just pick a house at random and lay siege to it. There were quite a few old ladies who got awfully pissed at us. Imagine, old biddy Minnie taking an apple pie out of the oven, when some snotty little 12 year old busts through the kithen door, holding a plastic assault rifle, screaming, “Freeze, dirtbag!!”
Aaah, the good old days.
“Enemy Headlights” Inane, but when you grow up on a military base where it was safe to run around in the dark…
Rules were simple. Wait for a car to come down the street, the first to sight it screeched out the catch phrase, and everyone hit the grass and covered their head. If you couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see you. The lookout would daringly raise his head to confirm the ‘all clear’. This could go on for hours.
We also used to play ‘I Spy’ in the storm sewers. A soda six pack ring holder (the type you were supposed to cut so the sea gulls wouldn’t strangle) held at arms length rendered the user invisible.
OH, we used to play with the 6-pack soda rings too. We would set them on fire and see how long we could hold them. They would make a cool fwoomp sound and drop little fireballs.
Kick the can was one of our favorites. But our absolute favorite was a game we just refered to as “The running game”. Which was a hybrid of tag, hide & seek, and red light green light. Somehow me and some friends concocted this game and made out all the rules. It involved a lot of running around my best friends house, which had a swamp behind it. One part was that the guy who was “it” would have to tag all the other guys, not just one. And the guys who were not “it” had to make at least one full circle around the house before the could go on the “goal”. The was some strategy to it, and sometimes a guy would have to double cross another player by yelling out his position to the “it” guy, so he could get away and make it to the goal.
There were quite a few other rules which made it different than red light/green light or plain 'ol tag. But I won’t go into them now. This game was a blast, and we played it for years. Hey, some of us were 18 and still playing it!
Thanks for giving me an excuse for bringing up good memories, sqrl!
One time, my friends and I decided to play Robin Hood (for lack of a better explaination as to why we pulled off this bone headed maneuver). We got out our trusty fiber-glass bow and arrow set, along with some torn up rags, a can of gasoline and Bic lighter. You know the drill, make a flaming arrow and launch it across the field behind MacDonalds, just to see it.
“Whoah, cool, did you see the flames drag of the back of it? Neat-o, shoot another one, but with a bigger flame!”
So my friend constructs another flaming arrow, but alas he is not satisfied with the size of the flame. He decides the blaze needs just a little more gasoline. He tips the gas can over the flaming tip of the arrow. The gas hits the flame, burns up the stream and completely ignites the the gasoline filled coffee can.
My friend’s reaction was understandable. He squealed like a little girl and tossed the can as far away from himself as he could muster.
I gotta say, it was kind of cool to see all the fire trucks rolling in to put out the near-uncontrollable inferno behind MacDonalds. Those brave souls of the fire department saved many a quarter pounder with cheeses that day.
Well, I can’t imagine anyone not having a favourite game that they liked to play when they were growing up unless their parents kept them chained in the basement or something.