One guy closes his eyes and says Marco. When he says Marco everyone else says Polo. The Marco guy has to try to tag someone with his eyes shut. I guess it’s like blind man’s buff in the water.
Is this not dangerous? Blind mans buff in the water? Who is the winner… The last kid to drown?
Find the teacup. Under the bedsheet. With Aunt Sophie.
These are generally pretty good swimmers. It was always fun to answer “Polo” then swim underneath the person who was “it”.
[QUOTE=MGibson]
Smear the Queer or Kill the Carrier: Basically you give one guy the football and everybody tries to tackle him. Yes, I understand the inappropriate nature of calling a game Smear the Queer but I didn’t really understand it when I was younger.
When I saw the thread title, smear the _ _ _ _ _ was the first thing that popped into my mind but I didn’t have the stones to say it. Thanks ~
Mainly we threw rocks at each other. I’m convinced this one kid named Marty grew into a monumentally fucked-up adult because of this absolutely gorgeous hit I scored on the back of his head when he was riding his bike down the alley behind my house.
“Darth Vader” (why it was called this we have no idea)
A version of dodge ball. About 5 or 6 kids have balls and stand mid field. Everyone else lines up at one end. When the kids with the balls shout “Darth Vader!” everyone else runs and tries to get to the opposite end of the field. The ones with balls try to hit as man people as they can as they run by. Repeat until only one person remains.
Grew up on USAF bases. We played “enemy headlights” in the front yard after the street lights came on. (That was the sign to return home from 20 blocks away)
Really dumb. If a car was coming, someone sang out “EH” and everyone hit the grass and covered heads with hands. If you couldn’t see the lights, you couldn’t be seen. That’s the entire game. Over and over.
I was still doing this in junior high with my younger sibs and the rug rats of the block.
Another game my younger brother and I played was Army Men. Not the crappy ones that they sell now, but the older green ones. We’d spend hours (or was it only 30 minutes?) setting up mock battle fields.
One time we accidently broke one, so we gave it a burial with full military honors. We wrapped it in toilet paper, wrapped string around it and buried it in the yard. Before we did that we carefully cut his weapon away from him, and stuck it in the ground sticking up as his tombstone.
For years we’d find soldiers in the weirdest places around the house.
Remember those guns which shot out dime-sized plastic disks? My grandpa, uncle and I used to play “Stealth Assasins” with those (usually ending up with me running shrieking down the hall as they shot me in the back.) Goddam miracle none of us ever lost an eye.
Anyway, my grandmother found those things for* years* afterwards. She actually found one about twelve years later, stuck in a baseboard behind the piano. (She cried when she told me that, because my uncle had died and it brought back a lot of memories when she discovered it.)
Me and my brother played a lot of “cars”. This wasn’t really a game, we just got out our matchboxes (which I probably need to explain were a brand of small metal toy cars) and raced them around a lot. We’d hurl them off tables, into walls, down the stairs, and into head on collisions. Obviously this did a lot a damage to your car’s resale value.
Glow Fights: We had tons of little glow-in-the-dark doo-dads: pieces of models, superballs, and so on. We’d go into a darkened room (usually we played in the winter for maximum darkness) and fire away. The best was the deception that a friend of mine came up with: he put his hand flat on the floor, palm up, with a glowing piece in the middle. When someone would reach for it, he’d snatch it away and drill them with it.
Lava Monsters: In elementary school, we had one of those hemispherical jungle gyms. Whoever was “It” would be inside it. As the Lava Monster, they had to reach or jump to get the kids scampering around the outside of the jungle gym. (Man, what is it with kids and lava?)
Unnamed Game: on the days when the free “throw-away” newspapers were delivered, we’d arm ourselves with them. One kid would go down to the end of the block, around the corner, and count to 25. Everyone else would hide. Then the counter had to make it from the corner to the tree in our front yard. The other players could pop out at any time and start wailing on the counter with their newspapers. They could keep wailing until the counter reached the tree.
Unnamed Game Two: one kid would ride by on his bike. The remaining players would throw broom handles at his wheels, hoping to catch it in the spokes and flip the bike over. We rarely made, but when we did, it was spectacular!
Cave Goddess. I usually played this by myself, although a friend would occasionally join me. Basically I would dig little caves in the ground, decorate them and populate them with stick “people.” Then I would decide what disaster would strike that day. Flood, earthquake, Godzilla etc. Man, that was fun.
My sister and I would play Romans in a Fort. We combined the dining room chairs with the recliner and the couch, draped them with sheets and made togas out of other sheets. Then we hid inside, defending the fort from attackers or devising clever ways to sneak out and attack.
Red Rover - one child starts in the middle of the quadrangle while 30 odd kids run at him. he has to tackle, bring to ground and shout “1,2,3 Red Rover Caught!” and that captured person joined the tackler in the middle and they did the same thing as kids ran back and across. No holds barred, phenomenally violent. When teachers banned “Red Rover” we just renamed the game
Backyard Cricket - accoriding to complex local rules. I once spent an entire Boxing Day being burned red raw compiling an epic 185 not out in the back yard of the Woodridge Tavern
FA Cup - 30 odd kids, 1 goalkeeper - first 16 to score a goal went through to the next round, then the forst 8,4,2,1 etc. We played with a basketball instead of a football. A guy called Dan who was perennial goalkeeper got knocked out 4 times in 2 years playing FA Cup
and the worst of all - Dozens. Basically, you tuck a football under you arm, back up 20 yards or so and you have to run in a dead straight line towards the kid who has to tackle you. Whoever came off worst in the clash got ragged on something dreadful. The whole object of the game was to find someone to humiliate. And to concuss your schoolmates, obviously.
mm
I thought of another one! “Boogers”.
The point of this game was to throw leaves at other kids, stuff leaves down their shirts, or just touch them with leaves while avoiding being ‘leafed’ yourself. We pretended that the leaves were boogers for added gross factor.
“Down the Toilet”
My gradeschool had a large hill on one side of the playground, and my friend Paul and I spent nearly every recess for about two years standing at the top of the hill, screaming “Whuuuuuussssssshhhhh!!!” and then running down the hill yelling at the top of our lungs and tracing decreasing circles on the ground below, until we met in the middle and spun in place until we fell down. One time the teacher made us stop because Paul spun so much that he threw up.
In the wintertime, that same hill would be snowcovered, and we would stomp the snow down in narrow tracks until they finally formed icy channels we could slide down. By unspoken agreement there was one track for each grade, and each grade stuck to their own track…unless a kid was so large he could force his way onto the bigger kids’ track. Needless to say this was a major deal. It was a major rite of passage the year I could slide down on my feet rather than my knees. Funny to think about that now: not a day went by without a major bruise or bloody nose somewhere in the schoolyard and the teachers just let it go. Try to do that THESE days…
Aww, what a sweet story.
This thread has me cracking up. The games some of ya’ll played were simply hilarious!! I especially like “The Mutliator” and “Bike Tag” (we did that one too but I was never brave enough to join, and besides I had a 10-speed so maybe I was smarter than I thought!)
We also played “Orphans” and/or “House” and made “food” like mud pies (with rocks on top for decoration), or soup with those wild onions that grow in the fields. One time one of my friends found a dead frog and we made a special soup out of that. I should say that the boys surprised the girls with this lovely dish.
Oh, yeah, and at my house, for some reason there was no lava, but there were shark infested waters!!! So don’t fall in!!!
We had a “shark infestation” in our swimming pool. Whenever a cloud would pass over and darken the waters, we would scramble, screaming, for the safety of the deck, or try to frantically climb onto a float. Someone would holler at the person who was trying to climb onto the raft: “It just tore off your leg!” and then you would have to pretend to be missing that limb. “Oh no-- it got your left arm!” (Try climbing onto a raft with only one arm and one leg!)
Several months ago, I hurt and embarrassed myself playing this. I’m a sophomore in college, but I suppose stupidity has no age limit, at least not if you’re me.
My roommate was mopping the kitchen floor after breaking a half dozen eggs on it. I was in the corner (where there’s a rug) joking about how I was going to slip and die. After she finished mopping, she looked around and realized there was no way out of the kitchen. So we played the lava game. After a bit of climbing on chairs, my roommate decided she was the LAVA MONSTER. Then I wanted to get back upstairs, but I had to get past the LAVA MONSTER first.
So I ran.
And slipped on the wet floor and fell on my ass.
(And yes, we were sober at the time.)
Most of my childhood games have been covered already (Manhunt, Red Rover, Bike Skid contests, Wall Ball), but we used to make up our own games too.
The most enduring was “Wire Object,” so named because, other than at least two people to play, all you needed was an object to throw (usually a tennis ball, but a stick or a rock would do in a pinch) and a wire to throw it over (usually a telephone cable).
We had all sorts of rules and a complex scoring system that escapes me now, but the crux of the game was to toss the object over the wire and have your opponent try to catch it. If they caught it, they threw it back, but if they missed it or dropped it, you earned points.
As we developed the game and got better at it, we came to enjoy using more oddly shaped objects that were difficult to catch, like a baseball bat. It’s a wonder none of us ever lost an eye or broke our skulls.
Then there was the ever popular “rock fight” which, simply put, involved taking cover and winging small rocks at one another until someone got hurt or someone broke a window.
Every once in a while we’d raid the alleyway behind the local Kmart and snake a bunch of large cardboard boxes, draw “attackers” on them with markers and crayons, set them up all around us, and take turns running through the gauntlet tossing darts and ninja stars at them. You got extra points for head or groin shots.
But my crowning achievement in game development was when, at about 10, I found a slightly bent, slightly rusty golf putter while dumpster diving (another favorite passtime, but not really a game). We’d go out into a field, dig some holes, and use the putter to drive rocks or acorns toward the holes from about 100 feet away, the winner of course being the person with the lowest number of strokes. The game part came in when we decided that it was too easy and decided that the other players could play defense by trying to catch or otherwise block the projectiles with their bodies.
We were also fond of climbing upon things: garages, trees, high fences, etc. It was a sign of manhood and worthy of praise to jump or fall from higher places than anyone else onto an old mattress or couch cushions that someone had unimaginatevly thrown out and which we had rescued.
Yes, I’m male, why do you ask?