Thud
“Sphere chase,” the unnamed sport of the Masters from John Christopher’s trilogy about the Tripods.
Dazzle Dart, from the Malcolm Jameson story “Bullard Reflects”.
ETA: All these Star Trek references, and has anybody mentioned good ol’ Three-Dimensional Chess? (Didn’t Paramount actually market some sets? Man, that’d be a collectable.)
Dazzle Dart, a relay-light-beam game in Malcolm Jameson’s 1941 science fiction story “Bullard Reflects”. Today, they’d use a laser beam instead of a flashlight. In the 1970s, somebody made a computer game out of it. I just wrote a piece about it for Optics and Photonic News.
Unlikeliest. Simulpost. Ever.
The card game TEGWAR from Mark Harris’ book & movie “Bang the Drum Slowly” .
TEGWAR stood for The Amazing Game Without Any Rules.
Gymkata!
How about The Long Walk and The Running Man?
Paper Football.
Thunderdome
31 posts and no one’s mentioned submarine races?
I seem to recall a licensed set being advertised in a magazine by one of those “The ____ Mint” companies.
Futurama satirized the three-dimensional chess by having a three-dimensional Scrabble board in one episode.
The Ren & Stimpy Show had “the most funnest game in the whole world,” Don’t Whizz on the Electric Fence. The rules are self-explanitory.
If they actually market a game and people buy it, doesn’t that disqualify it from this poll? If so, 3-D chess and Thud! are real games.
Arky Malarky in the old Eric Frank Russell story, “Now Inhale.”
Have you ever played “The Game” from Rosenkranz and Guildenstern Are Dead?
Do you not think the more relevant question may be, “Have you played it and known you were playing it?”
I was going to say TEGWAR.
Buck-Buck was a game from a very old Bill Cosby routine. Fat Albert used to dominate.
Buck Buck was a real game- it had different names, depending on the city you lived in. In New York City, where I grew up, kids called it “Johnny Ride a Pony.”
Whatever you called it, the object was the same: one side was bent over in a line, against the schoolyard wall, while the guys on the other team members took running jumps and tried to land as hard as possible on people’s backs, hoping to make them collapse.
Brockian ultra-cricket from Hitchhiker’s Guide
My grandfather tells me he used to play Buck Buck when he was a child. Since the Fat Albert routines and subsquent TV show were based on Bill Cosby’s actual childhood (and Fat Albert was supposedly a real person), it isn’t surprising that this game actualy exists.