Ha, now there’s a Minnesota clothing company cashing in by selling T-shirts: http://www.startribune.com/no-goose-here-local-company-markets-vikings-duck-duck-gray-duck-shirt/450460093/
I’ve never heard of ‘Duck-Duck-Goose’ with or without the Minnesota substitution. Are you referring to the game we call มอญซ่อนผ้า ? It’s played by young and by younger.
I might have played a similar game during the early Eisenhower Administration, but my memory comes up only with ‘Button Button Who’s got the Button?’
Just another data point to add, I grew up in south central Minnesota and it was “Duck, Duck, Grey Duck”.
Ah, but that’s the point. If you play “Duck, Duck, Grey Duck”, you may chose to use “red duck” or “purple duck” or even “paisley duck”, and it does not count as a grey duck. But some kids will be thrown off, because they are only partially listening, and react to anything that isn’t “duck”. False starts, on a color other than grey, get you taunted.
We call this game vrot eier (rotten egg), but it’s similar to the Thai one, there’s no counting, you drop a tennis ball or bean bag behind the person, they chase you, and you have to make it to their place before they catch you or else you’re a rotten egg and have to sit in the middle. Group size determined whether the chasee has to just go round once to sit down, or circle past once before the chasee is allowed to sit.
It’s no drie blikkies (similar to kick the can but with 3 cans stacked) or kennetjie (umm, a little like if you played cricket with a bail rather than a ball - but only a little) but still in the top 5 kid’s group games my generation played all the time, that my daughters’ generation probably never will outside “indigenous games” lessons.
Ohhhh. I confirmed this with my wife (I guess she thought it went without saying). That makes a lot more sense then. In “duck, duck, goose”, “duck” and “goose” are the only choices.
I work in St. Paul, so I asked around the office. I was wrong, you are correct. Except for northeast Minnesota, the state is a gray duck monolith.
Ignoring Metro inhabitants, who are all gray duck, I found:
Bemidji: gray duck.
Milaca: gray duck.
Mora: gray duck.
East Grand Forks, MN: gray duck.
International Falls: gray duck.
Hibbing: goose.
Duluth: goose.
Madison, SD: goose.
In Minot, ND, where I grew up, it was duck, duck, goose all the way.
In Milaca, they even play it in the original version: “red duck, blue duck, mauve duck, gray duck.”
Interesting! Thanks for the report. I wonder what inoculated the northeast from “gray duck”?
Your experience in Minot makes me preliminarily hypothesize that it is only the Red River valley area of ND, presumably by Minnesota influence, that deviates from “goose”.
I’m surprised BTW by how many people here have never heard of this game at all!
I have never heard of it but it seems similar to musical chairs in some aspects of the game. Am I correct?
I also remember some kind of game where an object is passed around in a circle and someone yells stop (or some other call out) and the person stuck with the object is the one banned from the group.
We just didn’t play the duck duck game I guess.
BTW I grew up in Western PA and went to 8 years of Catholic school.
It has elements of those games (the one you are talking about with the object passed around is “hot potato” BTW) but it also has a “tag” element because the person saying “duck, duck…” gets to choose who is the target.