best childhood gammmmemessss

"Brainboxer," wherein someone put an imaginary box on them and then you felt terrified.

oops...someone else put an imaginary box on YOUR head. I think you had to follow them around after that.

"Who got the Joke? Animal," wherein everyone stood in a circle clapping and chanting that and someone in the middle (everyone took turns) got to pretend to be Animal.

At secondary school we played football and cricket in the school yard. There was a section of wall JUST the right size for a goal and an area big enough for a fielding circle.

At primary school we played 'boys against girls'. This was indiscriminate. I usually spent this time identifying birds and grasses, thus avoiding any sort of inter-gender conflict.

anybody ever play Wallball? the addicting yet simple game where basically a bunch of people throw a ball against a wall, catch it as it comes off, and if you drop it, you have to run and touch the ball before another person picks up the ball and throws it against the wall.

Penalty was being pegged with the ball (usually a tennis ball)

We played a similar game whereby a football was kicked into the goal, rebounding out (off the brick wall) to the next challenger. There was a set order of players. The aim was to kick the ball in the goal before it stopped moving. If you missed, you lost a life. First three people to lose a life had to line up against the wall. The winners were the ones who each had a penalty against their exposed behinds.

Please god tell me it was just a ball thrown at it.

Oh geez I didn't word that well.

I usually spent this time identifying birds and grasses

louis, always with the sex and drugs

At primary school we played 'boys against girls'. This was indiscriminate. I usually spent this time identifying birds and grasses

Did you go to primary school in a women's prison?

rofl

SAME JOKE, DIFFERENT WORDS

In our class there were 20 girls and 6 boys so the boys' superior belligerence was matched by weight of numbers. Besides, some of those girls were VICIOUS! Fingernails like piranhas' teeth. When I say birds and grasses, I am sorry to disappoint, but I was quite the naturist in my youth.

and then the childhood classic, "500", where some doofus would call out a number and throw a Nerf football 3000 feet into the air and whoever caught it would get that many points until they reached 500

I played an obsessive spy game with my best friend where we ran round the playground and shouted out letters of the alphabet that were code for 'hide!!!!!' and 'run left!!!!!' and 'duck!!!!!!!!' and so forth.

DOWNBALL

You had a wall and a ball and you had to bounce it. I can't remember what happened after that.

but I was quite the naturist in my youth

um

My personal game was "not getting publicly humiliated or physically harmed by classmates," which for about four years hiding on my granddad's grave (I never met him) at the city cemetery, which was right next to our playground, separated by a split-open chainlink fence.

yea well I had that problem too (other than the graveyard thing). which I'm sure comes as no surprise to anybody here

i will not embarrass myself on this thread

I liked the one where all four of us sat in an old hammock indian style and pretended we were paddling and sang a song that went "Canoe canoe canoe canoe, canoe canoe canoe. Canoe canoe canoe canoe, canoe canoe canoe" to the tune of something I cannot now identify. If you fell out of the hammock from being rocked too hard, the alligators got you.

picturing that just made me grin

trying to walk from one end of the house, upstairs, to the other end of the house, downstairs, without touching the carpet.

doing the reverse on the way back

cutting 'wilderness' trails in the woods behind my house with my dad's hedge clippers. one of them went for 2/3 mile, and became a neighborhood bike spot.

trying to dig up the entire sand-box

I used to get out of bed while everyone else was sleeping and try to walk through the house in the dark based only on knowing where certain objects were. I was allowed to open my eyes and take a "snapshot" of the room but then I had to remember approximate distances until the next doorway.

oh and we used to play this baserunning game on the kickball diamond where we'd pair off teams and two players (one from each team, at a time) stood on home plate and ran opposite directions around the basepath and whomever got back to home first won.

I won once and this asshole accused me of cheating by leaping in front of him at second base. Fuck him.

i did that during the day! all the time! tried to walk the entire house with my eyes closed -- usually ended up tripping over the dog.

sister and i swinging from column to column in the basement, blindfolded, trying not to bump into each other

Bombardment was always classic but since we only had one PE teacher officiating players cheated all the damn time.

Buying wisteria leaves from each other using lilac leaves for money.

canoe canoe canoe....

Tracing the floor plans of houses in the dirt with a stick and then inviting people to come in and visit you and yelling if they stepped over a wall accidentally.

We had a lot of unsupervised play time.

Pushing each other off the merry go round

Getting momentarily lost in the back 40 and tearfully begging the dog to lead me home, like I was going to starve and be raised by foxes out there, or something.

we used to record (well, my friends reluctantly did, I was a bossy prick as a kid) sci-fi serials on cassette tape called "laser wars" which was a complete unashamed ripoff of Star Wars and featured human beat boxing and rap songs

anybody ever play Wallball? the addicting yet simple game where basically a bunch of people throw a ball against a wall, catch it as it comes off, and if you drop it, you have to run and touch the ball before another person picks up the ball and throws it against the wall.

we played a varition of this called "spread" where if you didn't touch the wall before the other person picked up the ball and threw it against the wall you were "out". after three outs you had to stand spread eagle against the wall and everyone else who was playing go to huck the ball at you as hard or as soft as they wanted. you could call "no headhunting" but there was always one prick who would try to hit you in the side of the face with a fucking tennis ball.

Getting momentarily lost in the back 40 and tearfully begging the dog to lead me home, like I was going to starve and be raised by foxes out there, or something.

-- Laurel, Tuesday, November 27, 2007 10:46 PM (Tuesday, November 27, 2007 10:46 PM) Bookmark Link

yeah, getting lost in the woods and coming out the next town over scared the living hell out of me when i was 9, it was pretty much the aim by the time i was 11.

here's one I forgot--Tennis Baseball at shitty summer camp

i never went to camp so i'll take your word for it. we used to play pond hockey in the swamp near our house but the pond was kidney shaped so the two goalies (usually whomever wasn't wearing skates) couldn't see each other.

Bonkers, Banzu, Omega Virus and Mall Madness

Omega Virus.

"Enteh...roob...coode" (freaking weird computer voice)

omega virus was awesome!

also, when I went to camp some kid had these scratch off games, they were on cards like the big lottery tickets except the games were baseball, rampage, uh whatever.. tons of original games where you and a friend take turns scratching. I never found out what it was called or where to get them :( I think at the time they were sold at Party City. But this was 15 years ago or something. If any of you can help?

oh wait, this thread is for stuff like the 'star wars' dodgeball game in gym class or crab soccer.

anybody ever play Wallball? the addicting yet simple game where basically a bunch of people throw a ball against a wall, catch it as it comes off, and if you drop it, you have to run and touch the ball before another person picks up the ball and throws it against the wall.

Penalty was being pegged with the ball (usually a tennis ball)

-- Bo Jackson Overdrive, Tuesday, November 27, 2007 4:53 PM

We played this and called it "Suicide". Which got us in trouble if the teachers heard us call it that. The fact we threw the balls at each other was okay though. We played it with whatever we had...tennis ball, kickball, whatever. It was my favorite.

Wait, newcomb? Surely this was 'nukem'? It was played heavily when I worked at a summercamp day camp, its spelling was much debated esp. by foreign counsellors.

Manhunt is pretty classic.

We actually played that in college a couple times, still fun.

The Newcomb I'm talking about is a variant of volleyball, and its spelled that way because it originated at Sophie Newcomb College.

Ok this isn't a 'game' but did anybody else have the 'Doorknob' agreement in high school?

I thought it was universal but other friends of mine who didn't go to my high school don't recognize it.

It's basically where someone farts (audibly or silently). If the aggressor says "safety", he is in the clear (some circles did not recognize this opt-out however). If a nearby person shouts "doorknob", the farter has to touch the nearest doorknob or get punched repeatedly until he does by the person who shouted it.

It was great because in the choir room (omg SHUT UP) the room was gigantic and only really had one or two doorknobs way on the other side of the room. so one day this guy shreds the prelude to a log in class, the other guy shouts "doorknob" and both of them in the middle of a rehearsal sprint halfway across the room, with the farter catching the doorknob in the nick of time.

My siblings and I made up a trampoline bouncing game, which was not so much as so much about numbers of bounces or stamina or height but rather attempting to stop another from bouncing by proposing a new rule preventing them from bouncing with a complicated, constantly evolving ratification system based on bouncing.