This train of thought started when viewing a Lysol commercial, which shows a Dad fishing through the garbage, looking for his kid’s favorite marble. My BS detector started to go off…because the thought occurred to me: do kids still play marbles? Did kids ever play marbles, in living memory?
I’m a Boomer, and I never did, nor did any of my peers. I was aware of the game, but only in a Norman Rockwellian nostalgia senses (I may actually have played once, but only mimicking something seen on TV).
My generation did play other sidewalk & schoolyard games, like hopscotch, jumprope & jacks–and these were all natural and organic: everybody knew the rules. But not marbles.
So, dopers: did you or didn’t you? (and how old are you?)
Oh yeah! Of course kids played marbles, and I bet some still do.
My dad played marbles. He was born in 1931, and gave my sister and me his jar of marbles to play with when we were kids. He even taught us how to draw the circles on the sidewalk with chalk and stuff.
Really hurts when you crack the top of your finger trying to snap a marble, though. Ouch.
I still have most of his marbles in an old jar. He, however, seems to be suffering from the loss of his marbles…
Haven’t played marbles in years, though. (Don’t wanna get busted for drawing on the sidewalk outside of my apartment building! :D)
Well, I’ll tell. I’m 40 and I remember playing marbles when I was about 9 or 10. We were even allowed to bring them to school and have little tournaments at recess. There were circles prepainted on the playground.
Matter of fact, one of my neighbor friends was FANATICAL about it. The circle had to be EXACTLY the correct dimension. He even had a wooden “X” that had holes drilled through it so the marbles in the circle could be spaced apart just so… kind of like racking the balls for pool.
I’m 27 and I played marbles. Or, more specifically, I lost a lot of marbles to the other kids on the playground (Damn you, Shane Johnson! ).
The game we played was pretty straightforward. Toss your marble on the ground a reasonably short distance away. Your opponent would try to knock it with a toss of his own marble. If he missed, you got a crack. Winner keeps both.
Hmmm…the origin of the phrase “playing for keeps”, I betcha.
Did any scenario arise where it was possible for a single play to be “for all the marbles”?
Speaking as a 15 year old, I have played marbles with my grandparents. I don’t know about city kids my age, I live in the country and there wasn’t much for me to do until we got a computer.
But my father never had an interest in marbles, and neither did my uncle.
I played marbles when I was a kid. I made up new rules every game, though; I didn’t even realize until many, many years later that there were actually rules to “marbles.”
Depending on the rules. In Australia, when I was a marble-playing kid (say, late 70s), we had two games. One was the “draw a circle on the ground” variant already discussed here, while the other required a small pit, maybe four centimetres deep with shallow, sloping sides.
The aim of the game was to shoot the marbles into the pit (not as easy as it sounds. If the shot was less than dead-on, the sloping sides would just ‘slingshot’ it out again. If the shot was perfectly aimed, but too hard, it would just go straight through to the other side. To make it more difficult, the game was very rarely played on a perfectly flat, level surface; you had to contend with little bumps and hollows in the dirt).
Whoever shot the last marble into the pit won all the marbles, if you were playing keepsies, that is.
).