When I was a kid in the 70s, I believe we called it “Star wars”.
Basically, each kid takes a half of the paper. On each half, both players draw their ships (usually a bunch of X’s and H’s)
To fire at the other ships, You would make a circle and fill it in on your side of the paper. Then you would fold it over, and “scrape” over where you made the dot. With the intention leaving a mark on the other side of the paper. Then you would unfold the paper and hope you hit one of the other guy’s ships.
We didn’t do shots like that, and we had units that could move between turns.
Each unit could move a certain number of dashes per turn, and at the end of the movement, you’d put the tip of the pencil on the unit, held in place by a finger on the eraser end of the pencil. Then you’d move your finger in a way to make the pencil shoot out towards an opposing unit, leaving a streak of pencil on the paper. If the streak hit another unit, that was a hit.
Like this:
ETA: I forgot to say, we never played the OP game.
[quote=“Horatius, post:3, topic:839063”]
We didn’t do shots like that, and we had units that could move between turns.
Each unit could move a certain number of dashes per turn, and at the end of the movement, you’d put the tip of the pencil on the unit, held in place by a finger on the eraser end of the pencil. Then you’d move your finger in a way to make the pencil shoot out towards an opposing unit, leaving a streak of pencil on the paper. If the streak hit another unit, that was a hit.
Like this:
[/QUOTE]
I was going to ask if I could hijack the thread for another game with pencil and paper, but since you beat me to it…
We had a game using the same principle as yours, except it wasn’t a war game. We would draw the outline of a road, add some obstacles like oil slicks or boulders, and use the same shooting motion to indicate where our “car” started and ended each turn. If you hit something in the road, your turn ended, otherwise you kept going.
At some point, after these rules were established someone developed the skill of placing his finger on the eraser, and rather than “shooting” the pencil, he would nudge it along across the page making a mark. This ended our playing of the game, because we could never agree on if this should be allowed or not.
Remember the game, sure, but I couldn’t enumerate all the possible rules variations off the top of my head.
That’s not the way I remember it. The game I know, the players start with their cars at rest on the starting line and take alternate turns. Each turn, you may alter your velocity by at most 1 in each of the horizontal and vertical axes, then draw a straight line to your end point. If you hit anything, you automatically lose!
We played something like that. But Oh what we wouldn’t have given for a pencil & clean paper when I was young.
We had to make do with burnt sticks and a hog’s hide. But we were thankful to have the fire to burn the stick.
Correct. In my post, when I said “the same principle as yours”, I simply meant that in our game we did the whole “put your finger on the tip of the eraser and shoot it across the page, leaving a mark” thing…
We did indeed play the game outlined in the OP, but didn’t call it “Star Wars” since Star Wars was, um, not a thing in the dark ages. Thanks for bringing that game back to mind, I think I’ll teach it to my grandson.
We didn’t do shots like that, and we had units that could move between turns.
Each unit could move a certain number of dashes per turn, and at the end of the movement, you’d put the tip of the pencil on the unit, held in place by a finger on the eraser end of the pencil. Then you’d move your finger in a way to make the pencil shoot out towards an opposing unit, leaving a streak of pencil on the paper. If the streak hit another unit, that was a hit.
Like this:
[/QUOTE]
This is how we did it, almost exactly.
My brothers and I played a bunch of different paper-and-pencil games. One we called “tops and bottoms,” in which we would each, without letting the other see, draw the head of a person/animal/robot/whatever. We’d then fold the paper with only two lines representing a neck visible below the fold, trade drawings, and provide the body to the other’s head.
We also had a golf game, wherein one player would design a hole. The other would study said hole, then close his eyes and attempt to draw a line from the tee to the hole. Going out of bounds or hitting a tree or sand trap or other obstacle counted as a stroke. Some of the holes got pretty elaborate and crazy.
Mostly we used the type of shots Horatius described although I do seem to recall the dot method. It wasn’t Star Wars, though. It was army ground forces.
There was a advanced variant that included combined arms …although I wouldn’t have called it that then. There were tanks, infantry, and bunkers if I recall correctly. Maybe planes but that’s extra fuzzy. Tanks and bunkers could kill infantry and each other. Bunkers couldn’t move though. Infantry couldn’t move as far as tanks and had to be close to kill anything other than infantry. I think there was even some length of wire obstacle allowed that impacted movement.
