Games we played as youngsters....

Outdoor game ... we would go out in the evenings, in the summer, and see who could catch the most fireflies in jars we poked holes in.. did that often out on the farm. Are there fireflies anymore?

Enjoyed going on trips as a kid and playing 'Guess the make of car' as cars went by. That game really worked back then, since car models actually looked different... hehe And then we also played who could get the most cars in the color we chose to be.
Sure was a different world back then.
 

Hop Scotch, double dutch, domino, chess, checkers, scrabble, monopoly, crib for hours and hours! We spent the summer with my Grandmother by the ocean and had no TV so board games were always great. We spent hours doing paint by numbers and jig saw puzzles. I still love doing the puzzles but have to be careful because I have a hard time walking away from them and then nothing else gets done. We would also collect shells and then get a good sized rock and put putty all over it - stick the shells on and call them "door stops". Every one of them was a masterpiece!! lol
 
At recess we would do Fox & Geese or Three Billy Goats gruff. At home I loved Monopoly and checkers. We sold 15 puzzles in our restaurant, so I became expert with them.
 
I cannot remember ever finishing a game of Monopoly but we played for days on end. Also, cannot ever remember winning a game of Checkers. Of course, we played card games like War and Go Fish. My grandma and aunt and mom and sister played a lot of Canasta but I never got the hang of it. Hearts is a great card game! Scrabble and Dominos were always fun. Oh, and Tiddlywinks was a big one! Pachisi was fun. Shoots and Ladders. Candyland. To this day, I love a game where you just roll the dice and move your marker along without much strategy. Heavy thinking reduces the relaxation factor. Yahtzee was fun. Rummy 500. So many . . . I'm sure they'll be popping into my head now for days.

Outside, we played Hide 'n' Seek, of course. Well, we played that inside, too. Moving around in a military family I noticed that at different schools different games were popular. At one school boys did NOT play Hopscotch. But in the same year at a different school it was all the rage. Four Square and if it was just me and the kid across the street, Two Square. Kick the Can. Red Rover. Red Light/Green Light. Freeze Tag and just regular ol' Tag. Cowboys and Indians and WAR...

Also, I'm strangely proud, as an adult to remember when Pong arrived on the scene. It was all down hill from there on out . . .
 
We played red light/green light, monopoly, checkers, Chinese checkers, cowboys and indians, etc. too. Outdoors was popular for jump rope, regular, Chinese, double dutch, etc. Also played a lot with the pink Spalding balls, handball, stoop ball, ace, king, queen, hit the stick, and plain old catch. Bad minton and tennis sometimes.
 
Here's one that I'm sure is the root of rugby: Smear the Queer or more politically correct, Kill the Guy with the Ball! A bunch of kids would just run around with a ball, usually a football but it didn't matter, while everybody tried to tackle him. The longer you could avoid being tackled the better you were, I guess. At the last minute, you were supposed to toss the ball to anyone up for catching it and running like hell. Sometimes, the runner would just let himself get tackled for a good old fashioned pile on. We had a blast and I don't remember anyone ever getting hurt. It was also a universal game that everywhere my family moved the kids would play.
 
I told you these things would be popping into my head for days. Tether Ball!!! We mostly played at school. But, some kids had a set-up in their backyard. Pick-up football, basketball and baseball was always popular. Word of warning: NEVER join in a game of Hawaiian Basketball. Those guys play rough and will actually push, punch and tackle you. No fun...
 
We used to play a card game called "War." Very simple (it may go by other names) but basically you split a deck (after shuffling) equally and then each turn would have each player put a card down face up. Whoever had the highest took both and put them face down in a winnings pile. Any turn resulting in the same card values resulted in both players putting three cards face down and a fourth face up to see who won the whole bunch (10 cards).

This would go back and forth until one player had all the cards. We used to play this with four decks and it would take days! Recently on a flight to HI I taught this game to a Japanese teen (female) who was sitting next to who spoke zero English (ditto with my Japanese). She picked it up quickly and we played several games. when her tour leader came by before landing I was able to thank her for the games.
 
I remember playing "Punch-a-Bug. On road trips Everytime you saw a Volkswagon you punched your partner.

one time my step-dad said, "there are 547 cows in that field." I replied, " how do you know that?"

He said," I counted their legs and divided by 4." :confused::confused:
 
We played "War" as well, and something I think was called "500 Rummy" (?) - and yes, those games would go on forever.

Monopoly for the family and Risk for me and my brothers - we took it seriously.

Outdoors was more free-form stuff - soldiers, tag, bike races, roller-skating races. I grew up after the Kick The Can era so it was never one of our "sports". We went in more for street football and stick-ball.

Not much at checkers but learned chess from my older brother at a young age - I always lost.

Making plastic models, slot-cars, HO trains - stuff more from the '60's, I suppose, which fit into my generation.

But it was all good. :D
 
We also played pick-up sticks, and cowboys and Indians, I liked our cap-guns, so much fun! Remembered also playing 'Go Fish' with cards. Also remember my brother catching fireflies in jars, amazingly cool at the time. :sentimental:
 
Ozarkgal said:
Boo's Mom...we caught fireflies in mason jars, also. Yes, there are still fireflies. Here in the summer sometimes there are so many it looks like mini fireworks up in the sky. I was so thrilled to see them when we moved here. It had been years since I had seen any.
Click to expand...

So glad to hear that .. had thought they had gone the way of the dinosaur. But not too surprised, as stars are non-existent in the evening sky down here. And I think stars still exist.. :D Well rarely there is a sighting of a few.

Another outdoor game, when there were enough kids around, we played Red Rover, or some form of it back then.
 
There are a lot of the games mentioned here, that I remember hearing about, but didn't play . I tried red rover, and kick the can, but I was never a very good runner, so I usually didn't do well in those kinds of games.

My favorite, of course, was some kind of cowboys, and pretend horses ( mine whinnied a lot, too, Ozark) and I always wanted to be Roy Rogers, so I could ride Trigger, but often had to "settle for" Rex Allen or Lash LaRue. I had several nice sets of gun and holsters that the other kids wanted to borrow , so I did have some good bargaining points.

My folks played pinochle, and after that, canasta, in the winter . I was an only child, so house time was usually spent either reading (Walter Farleys Black Stallion series was a favorite ), or drawing the illustrations of the horses.
I did the clip-clopping with jar lids, as well, but I did it with my hands and not with my bare feet.
 
They still play "How Many Steps Before The Queen?" in NYC's Greenwich Village, but of course they're all adults and they're all queens ...
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HFL mentioning playing pretend horses reminded me of running around with our arms out playing airplanes. One of the guys my dad flew with had a son and we played together a lot. We would set two chairs next to each other and play pilots. We even had make believe names. One of us was Scott and the other was . . . Ah, the years have passed and I've forgotten. Will probably come to me out of the blue eventually...
 
That Guy, you might have missed all the innovative horse whinnying, but the playing airplane with your arms out for wings would have been great for not only airplane sound effects, but swooping and diving your plane as well, and hopefully you didn't "crash"too often.
I think that Special Effects has to be one of the greatest things about whatever we did as children. It was great for developing our imagination, since they were usually very realistic and creative. Sometimes , I think it is too bad that we tend to lose a lot of that when we grow up, and have to keep our conversations more conventional.
 
We tried playing "Airplane" as well, but since we lived within an hour's drive of several airports and had watched the traffic many times we chose to stand motionless in a field with our arms outstretched for several hours.

We called it "Delayed" :(
 
I remember a ball game called 7_up that we played as a kid. You tossed a tennis ball against a wall 7 times and caught it. Then there were other moves. Examples: toss the ball against the wall, let it bounce once, and caught it 7 times. Toss the ball as in the example, spin yourself around and catch the ball, 7 times. There were many moves. You kept going until you dropped the ball.

Hmmm. Wonder if I should take up that game again for improving gross motor coordination? Well, I'd probably spin myself around, trip and throw my knee out again. Darn-it. I loved that game whether I played it alone or competed with friends against the school house wall.
 
Frisbee. Originally pie plates from the Frisbie Pie Company (according to urban legend, anyway).

Loved it from an early age, so much so that I was the NYC Freestyle Champion in '75 and '76. I slept with the things so I'd never be too far from one should the urge to throw come upon me. We'd have all-day marathon sessions starting at 8am and going 12 hours just throwing and catching, throwing and catching.

We used to move something like this, but didn't use the terms "Dude" or "Bro" quite so liberally ...

 

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