I remember playing desktop games versus another classmate when we had any spare time or quietly without gaining the attention of the teacher. One of these was a simple football-style game played with a piece of paper folded up into a roughly triangular game piece. You would flick it so it slided across the desktop toward the opponents edge and you would score point(s) if any part of it was hanging over the edge when it came to a standstill. I can’t remember the point system.
Another desktop game was a simple tank battle game played with a single 8-by-11 paper and a pencil. After drawing basic representations of terrain and tanks, players would take turns shooting at one another’s tank(s) by drawing or sliding a pencil to make a straight line shot. I just found such a paper in an old peachy folder from my junior high school days. I can’t remember the rules or precise procedure for that game.
I also remember playing the game where you drew a grid of dots and then the players took turns connecting two adjacent dots. Four lines formed a square and the player who drew the fourth line and completed the square got a point and was allowed to make another move. So the game usually ended when one player was able to fill in a series of squares.
You drew seven circles in a line and put a penny in the middle circle. The object of the game was to push the penny all the way to the final circle on your opponent’s end of the line.
Both players started with 100 points and a sheet of paper. Each player would secretly write down a number. It had to be at least one and it could be as high as your current total. Then both players revealed their numbers. Whoever had a higher number could push the penny one space. And then both players had to subtract their numbers form their total. In case of a tie, the penny remained in place and both players just subtracted their numbers.
Played football and hockey (with a coin) all the time, but less at school and more at restaurants while waiting for food.
I’ve never heard of the tank game. I take it you don’t get to draw the entire line? I was thinking you were going to describe that game with the dots where you try to draw boxes. That one I played a couple times but got bored quickly with.
We used to play something where you’d fold a piece of paper in half across the width. On one side you’d draw some tanks and, on the other, someone would draw (with pencil) dark circle “bullets”. Then you fold the paper opposite of itself (so the outside is now the inside) and rub the paper to transfer the pencil graphite in the “bullets” to the tank side and see which tanks got blown up. Repeat and see which of you blew up more tanks or who runs out of notebook paper first.
You could either play it with a friend or, in a pinch, play by yourself.
We also knew how to fold paper into two varieties of space fighters, a skill which has actually come in handy with my own son, back when he was younger and we would find ourselves bored in a doctor’s office or something. Find a memo pad or brochure or something, fold it into a space ship, good for ten minutes of amusement.
You needed a bunch of index cards. Every person got fifteen cards which were numbered one to fifteen. Then there was the snakes and diamonds deck, which was also fifteen cards. You had ten cards with one to ten diamonds and five cards with one to five snakes. The snakes and diamonds deck would be shuffled and placed face down.
Then you would turn over the snakes and diamonds cards one at a time. When each card was revealed, the players would bid for it by placing one of their cards and placing it face down in front of them. All of the cards would then be revealed. Any cards that had the same number would be discarded. The highest remaining number won the snakes or the diamonds. Then all the bidding cards were discarded. If all of the bidding cards tied, then nobody won the snakes or diamonds. It remained on the table and a second card was turned over next to it and the players submitted a new bid for the pair of cards.
After you played your fifteen rounds, you added up the scores. You added up how many diamonds and how many snakes you had. (You were adding up the numbers on the cards not the number of cards. There was a total of fifty-five diamonds and fifteen snakes.) You then subtracted your snake total from your diamond total. The exception was if you had all five snake cards. If you managed that, you were a snake collector and then you added your snake total to your diamond total.
We played a race game that involved drawing a “track” and then taking turns using a pencil with one finger on the eraser to snap it to where your other hand was on the track. If you went out of bounds you lost a turn so the game was a trade-off between taking a short but accurate turn versus a long risky shot. It was loads of fun in 5th and 6th grade back in the 70s.
I vaguely remember that game, but we more often played a version with a coin (I think a quarter), and we had three attempts to flick it with an index finger across the table to get it to hang over the edge. Different points were scored depending on whether you were able to successfully attempt it on the first, second, or third attempt. If it went over, no points were scored and “possession” reverted to the other player. I also vaguely remember a variant that involved spinning a quarter, and then grabbing it with your two thumbs and attempting to shoot it into a “hoop” created by the other player and his hand(s).
We did the triangular football thing. You’d take turns flicking the triangle to your opponent’s side of the table. If you got more than a point to hang over the edge, you’d score a touchdown. Then your opponent would have to make goalposts with his fingers for your extra point. If you overshot the edge and the triangle fell off, your opponent got to flick from his side of the table. When you overshoot three times, your opponent gets a field goal try.
The girls would amuse themselves making cootie catchers.
We did this with spaceships. You drew the front half of a ship on either end of the paper including guns and bridge areas (same number each). Then you took turns “shooting” from each gun by pushing down on a pen from the top (the way BigDadWolf described his racing game). First one to knock out the opponents’ bridges wins.
This is exactly the way my friends and I played it. Possession also reverted if you fell short of the edge of the table in three tries. I think the scoring was the inverse of the tries: 3 points if you hung it over the edge in one try; two points for 2; and 1 point for three tries.
One time when I was well into adulthood I found myself in a doctor’s waiting room with several others. I don’t recall if it was the mom who was the patient or her young son, but he was restless and acting up and generally being the kind of nuisance that a six-year-old boy can be.
I whipped out a quarter and taught him the coin football game, which we played on a waiting room table. He became completely absorbed in it. His mom was eternally grateful and thought I was a genius!
We played the triangle football (Rugby in the UK) game using a six-inch ruler rather than a paper triangle, otherwise the same game as described above including the goalposts for kicking the extra point (“conversion” in English).
The tank battle game, and the pencil-flicking to shoot, remind me of one that we played. It was naval combat rather than tanks and it worked like this:
One player drew a map on an exercise book page or loose-leaf A4 (usually the former). Then both players set up their ships on their map, which were simple geometric shapes about the size of the capital O here. On each player’s turn they could move one of their ships and fire. To move a ship you crossed it out, drew a line of evenly-spaced dashes and redrew the ship at the other end of it. You then took one or more pencil-flicks from the newly-positioned ship to try to hit and sink the enemy. Different ships had different capabilities, thus:
A triangle moved 6 dashes and fired once
A square moved 4 dashes and fired twice
A circle moved 3 dashes and fired three times
Any landmass obviously blocked both movement and fire.
Later refinements included:
– Reefs, landmasses with a dotted outline, blocked movement but not fire
– Lighthouses, a black dot with a ring around - movement through the ring was allowed but you could not shoot into the ring (neither side wants to accidentally hit lighthouses)
– Mines, a mine symbol with a ring around - any shot that hits a mine eliminates any ships inside the ring
– New ships: a star (usually one to a side) moved 8 and fired 3. A hovercraft (circle with inscribed H) could cross reefs
For the spirit of the game to be preserved it was important to use a pencil. A ballpoint pen was too easy to control allowing ridiculously long-ranged shots, though being kids we went through a phase…
That’s what I was referring to as “hockey.” I first played it at Dairy Queen because they would give you a plastic fake coin larger than a silver dollar. The coin was part of the meal and used to get a desert.
The variant we played, you always started from the back end of your table. No wonder I never found it all that fun with quarters, as I didn’t know you could just flick from where you left off.