Games people play.

In My Humble Opinion
1

Do you have homemade games? Things that you make up just to pass some time with a little more pleasantly?

When my kids were little they talked a lot and loudly and both at the same time (hey waitaminit-- they still do that). In order to walk down the street without losing my sanity I made up a game called Find It. It was a race. I’d say “782 minus 16!” and the first one to reach house number 766 was the winner.

In high school we played a game called Obscure Beginnings. Have you ever had a conversation about something really weird? We’d do that all the time. Some one in the group would make a comment on the current conversation— “Green glass dildos? Obscure Beginnings!” and everyone else would yell the topics of conversation that led up to green glass dildos. It would go something like this:
“Green glass dildos? Obscure Beginnings!”
“Those little Coke bottles look like they could be used for. . .”
“Green Coke bottles!”
“Derek has Coke bottle glasses!”
“Derek is as blind as a bat!”
“Didn’t you see me waving Derek?”
“Nancy waved----a green glass dildo! Obscure Beginnings!”

Nobody wanted to sit near us in the food court of Albee Square Mall.

How 'bout you? Any made up games?

2

Of course my sister and I had the * run around the living room without touching the carpet* game. We’d start out with a ton of cushions scattered on the floor and remove them one at a time so we’d have to make huge leaps from the couch to the arm chair to a pillow on the other side of the room. It was great :slight_smile:

Also we used to play clay, where one person would get to move the other person’s body to any position. We’d usually make the other have one hand on her crotch, one hand on her boobs, with her eyes closed and mouth open, or something silly like that. Thank God we didn’t have our own cameras back then, or there would be some awful pictures of me.

3

I have a game I used to play while passing the time. It’s hard to explain but I’ll try anyway.

Say you’ve got a magazine or newspaper article. You need to, using a pencil or pen, ‘hop’ from the right side of the article to the left side of the article using the letters of the words, line by line. When you come to a space that doesn’t have a punctuation mark, you ‘fall’ to the next line and keep proceding to the left. Once you get to the left, you drop to the next line and make your way to the right. The goal is to finish as close to the right margin as possible.

So using Grasshopper’s last paragraph as an example, starting from the first line, last character, you’d hop from the d to the ’ to the W to the . to the n and so on until you got to the space between the p in position and the y in any. You fall to the next line and hop until you fall through the space between the c in closed and the s in eyes and so forth.

This game works better on narrow paragraphs like those found in newspapers.

Yes, I know I’m weird…stop looking at me like that!

4

Oh, here is a solitary game I invented. You try to get from the web page you are on to a specific one you have in mind using only the hyperlinks available on the pages along the way or the Back button if you get trapped in a dead end. For example, I once successfully navigated from the Straight Dope home page to the homepage of my college mentor using only the links available. This idea came about when I read that any two web pages on the web are seperated by 6 links at most. I doubt that is true and it usually takes me a lot more but I am usually successful. The lower the score, the better.

5

Am I the only one with that song stuck in my head?

“…spending all day, thinking just of youuu…”

6

Nope. Been singing it ever since I posted the thread.
I gotta get away, gotta get away, I don’t
Know where to go
It’s hopeless so
I guess I’ll leave it alone
Games people play. . .

P.S. I love Clay. Gotta get my kids to play it.

7

We played something like “moving statues” or “Statue Maker” or something. You’d fling a kid and then yell “FREEZE!” and they’d have to stop in whatever position they were in. Then someone would be a statue buyer and they’d push a button on the statue kid and they’d start moving around. It was kinda weird, but we had fun…sigh…

8

My friends and used to play this hilarious game with a tape recorder. Person #1 would go into another room with the tape recorder and record a question. That person would come back and tell the next person in line what type of answer to give. i.e. a person’s name, an object, an activity, etc. Without knowing what the question was, that person would go in the other room, record their answer, then ask their own question. Repeat. We were in our early teens when we did this and we’d laugh our asses off.

9

I’ve made up zillions of games.

First of all, I write video games for a living, and used to do so as a hobby. (Is anyone interested in some phenomenally difficult puzzles in Loderunner: The Legend Returns or The Incredible Machine?)

But limiting myself to non-electronic games:

-I’ve invented, helped invent, or helped develop variations of, several party games, as described in this thread. In addition to those, there’s my favorite variation of Taboo, in which you don’t get to see the list of words you’re not allowed to say. Makes it vastly more fun in my opinion

-In high school I invented a bunch of variations of Ghost, with the most complicated (too difficult for me, or anyone I ever met, to play, but it might appeal to true word freaks) being Anaghost, in which the players take turns saying letters, and whoever says a letter which makes the entire collection of letters, in any order, form a complete word, loses. Ie: A - A - T (still OK, because aat, ata, and taa are not words) - S (still OK, because aast, asat, asta, aats, atas, atsa, saat, sata, staa, taas, tasa and tssaa are not words) P (loses, becase “pasta” is a word).

-I invented a neat game played with a chess set called “warpo”. Each player plays with their knights, bishops, rooks, and queen. They set them all up in some starting configuration. What it is is irrelevant, as long as the two queens are not lined up with each other. The players then take turns moving. All pieces move with standard chess queen movement. However, each of the pairs of pieces (ie, the two black rooks) are connected by a “wormhole” in space. So a player can move into one side of one rook and out the other side of it. The confusion is, each player warps through their own pieces just fine, but if you try to warp through your opponent’s pieces, you come out going in the 180 degree opposite direction. The only pieces that can be capture are queens, and you play until one player captures the other player’s queen. Or until everyone gets confused and stops, as tends to happen.

-I’ve invented too many variations of, and extra cards for, Magic: The Gathering to be worth mentioning

-And there’s always Roof Ping Pong. Which is not worth explaining here, but is very very fun. And no, it’s not just a ping pong table on a roof.

10

I played this as a kid too, so god only knows where it started.

11

I love making up games. These arent really what you are after, but what the hey, I’m gonna share’em with ya anyway.

They are ‘homemade’ as stated in the OP, but definately NOT for the kiddies mind you.

1st: Corridor Frisbee. You need a long corridor with doors at each end. A person stands at each end, guarding their door. The aim is to hit the opponents door, while they try to ‘save’ it. They then try to hit your door. Deflections off the walls are permitted. (When I played this, we were using a part out of a washing machine which approximated a frisbee - worked pretty well as I recall). Can get quite dangerous, so best played while incredibly drunk

2nd: Pool table ‘air hockey’. Take one standard pool table, a person at each end. The person at one end has their hands together on the table, up against the cushion, in the middle. Using a single billiard ball, the person at the other end flings the ball as hard as possible across the table into either of the opponents corner pockets. The other person attempts to stop the ball going down - quick reactions are obviously required. It is then their turn to attempt a goal. This is played FAST, no waiting around - so it easily gets out of control and the ball starts lifting off the pool table and heads for things like windows, doors, walls etc. Can get very dangerous, so best played while incredibly drunk.

Well, you did ask.

12

My mother used to have this LP collection called “Goofy Gold” It was a collection of goof ball songs that made it to the radio, ‘Flying-purple-people-eater’ and things like that. One of the songs on it was about a nash-rambler beeping behind a cadillac, and the song starts off slow and progresses faster and faster. Well, my lil’ bro and I would run around in circles faster and faster until we collapsed.

Saturdays were laundry days, with clothes, towels and sheets for 4 kids and two adults in the house that’s a LOT of laundry. It was us kids’ job to bring all of the dirty clothes down so mom could start washing. We’d grab it all at the same time and make this 4 foot tall pile at the bottom of the stairs. Then we’d jump on it from higher and higher stairs. Until we got yelled at at least.

13

My friends and I played a variation of tag called ‘monster’. The person who was ‘it’ was the ‘monster’. Other players could climb up playground equipment, but the ‘monster’ could only go up two steps, so you’d have several kids perched up on slides and stuff while one kid is straining to reach them. The playground we played it on was perfect, since none of the equipment was high enough to be completely safe. When it was clear one victim wasn’t going to be able to stay safe on his perch, he’d jump down and try to make a run for it.

We also used to play bicycle polo in the cul-de-sack using plastic hockey sticks while riding bicycles. That was some viscious fun. In our version, jamming your stick into the spokes of your opponent’s bike was perfectly legal. When we played, it looked more like we were simulating some cavalry battle than playing a sport :smiley:

14

I played this in Canada as well.

15

I love that song! It’s on the CD I’m listening to right now, in fact.

[sub]It’s by The Spinners, if anyone’s curious.[/sub]

Robin

16

We played this game extensively in the Barclay dorm at Haverford College, circa 1991. On at least one occasion, an innocent bystander opened her door, walked out into the corridor, and got a very seriously thrown frisbee to the side of the head :frowning:

Another game I remember being very very fun was a game where a guy on a ten-speed chases a guy on foot and tries to tag him. A ten-speed goes much much faster than a guy on foot. But it’s much less maneuverable.

17

While serving in the fireroom of a Frigate in the Navy we used to play “Trash Can Surfing”. A Frigate can roll tremendously in heavy weather and the object was to wait until just before the ship started to recover from a roll and jump onto an inverted trash can lid and try to slide as far as possible. Was quite fun but wiping out on metal deck plates was a painful experience.

18

Me and my friend play a game on our mobile phones where we try and get the stopwatch to stop on exactly 1 Second, but you can play it on any ordaniary stopwatch.

19

Ha. I was actually thinking of…

Sha na na, na na na, na na
Sha na na, na na na, na nay
Talkin’ bout you and me
and the games people play (oh ah)

20

In elementary school we had this great game called Chinese Baseball. There wasn’t anything Chinese about it, that’s just what we called it.

Anyway, the school playground had a huge blacktop area which was about three feet lower down than the area with the playground equipment and sand and so forth. So there was a small, three foot high wall which was angled at about 60-degrees from the horizontal connecting the two areas. Climbing up and down this wall was a very simple affair.

Chinese Baseball is played as follows. There are no teams, it’s every man for himself. You need one of those big red kickball balls. A person is selected to start, and everyone else scatters in the outfield. The starting person takes the kickball, and stands facing the little wall, with his back towards everyone in the outfield. He then throws the ball as hard as he can against the little wall, and because the wall is slightly angled, the ball bounces up and over the starter’s head, into the outfield. The starter then attempts to run the bases. If you get all the way around, you get a point and get to go again. If someone in the outfield catches the ball before it bounces, you don’t get a point and the person who catches it is up. If someone catches the ball after a bounce and throws it at you and hits you before you get to home plate, you don’t get a point and then that person gets to go. Since there’s no teams and everyone wants the ball (so they can have their turn “at bat,”) everyone is constantly running over each other to get the ball. My strategy was to try to aim it so it would go towards the densest area of people, naturally resulting in many of them crashing into each other instead of getting me out.

Ah, fourth grade, man. Those were the days.