I used to play the game "teach the neighborhood girls how to pee standing up". You know, to make a man out of them. By the age of 6 I had seen more vaginas than most 30 year old men and led to more seats being peed on than drunk girls in a night club doing that stupid hover move. I still don't know how it is I haven't got a golden shower fetish.
Along those same lines and I can't remember how old I was, but in elementary school we used to have peeing contests to see who could pee in the urinal from the furthest away. I remember you started at the urinal (or fairly close) and backed up from there and sometimes you could reach the opposite wall, which at the time, seemed like a long way away. I'm sure if I were to go back it would be like 5 feet, but God, those janitors must have hated us.
Diving Catches It's exactly what it sounds like. My buddy and I would throw diving catches to each other with a nerf liquidator football. One day, we were playing this in my backyard and I ran, full speed, and laid out for a ball. I woke up fifteen minutes later lying on the ground next to the clothsline pole that I had smashed into. My head looked like an artist's rendition of some extraterrestrial cranium. "Midnight" Dodgeball We only dubbed it "Midnight" because it was always played in my basement in complete darkness. You'd throw the ball at sound, basically. I've had maybe five black eyes my whole life and three of them came from playing that game.
I wrote about this on the old board, but in the apartment complex where I grew up as a kid, everyone was from Russia, and we had "practice fighting" and "stick fighting". The first involved fighting full-contact with friends on the cement first floor. Strikes to the groin (which thankfully, weren't as horrible when you're six years old), slamming someone against the stone pillars, and kicking downed opponents were all employed and encouraged. The second was even simpler; there were a bunch of trees growing nearby, and one would tear off three-foot, heavy wooden branches, and beat the other person over the head with it. I felt really upset and left out when my father forbid me from playing the second game. I almost forgot about this, but in 8th grade, we also played a game where the objective was to spray as many passing cars with water in a day as possible. Occasionally, the driver would abruptly stop, and try to get you. At that point, the game became more exciting. A 14 year old with a head start will outrun most people, but every so often, you get a fast one.
Don't tell me that I was the only child to have had the joy of playing Smear the Queer, or whatever colorful name others could've concocted. For the uninitiated, whoever had the ball basically just had to hang on to said ball for as long as possible, whilst all of your buddies tried to tackle you and to take the ball away. Nobody won, but fun was always had by all.
My brother and I would play "throw acorns at each other". That was about the extent of the game, we had an oak tree in our back yard so every autumn for a few years we would stand out there for hours throwing acorns at each other. After we were done we sometimes played "throw acorns at the pole". I'm sure you can figure that one out. Bull rush is a school yard favourite in New Zealand. One person stands in the middle of a field and tackles people as they run past. The tackled then become the tacklers and so on until there is no one left.
Whenever my brother and cousins met up at our grandma's house, we would invariably make our way into the moldy basement for an all out session of "War". To play the game, you picked a side of the basement (which was conveniently separated right down the middle by wooden columns) and horded up a stash of these heavy plastic pokerchips. You set up the antique furniture (like her victorian era bedpan chair- a shitter built right into a intracately carved wooden chair) to form cover positions and, when war is declared, you hurl the poker chips as hard as you could at the other players heads. Each side of the basement had its strengths and weaknesses, each had good cover, and it was carpeted so injuries from tripping and falling were relatively rare. Those poker chips were hard as hell though and stackable, so an asshole like my older cousin liked to put three or four together and whip them so that they came apart before they hit you. Getting one to the head from my brother (who now plays D1 baseball) left a welt. Those games got pretty damn intense but we usually had to stop when a picture frame got broken.
We played the same game but called it kill the kid with the ball. Apparently, you were much more creative kids... FOCUS: We used to play wall ball. Throw the tennis ball against a wall. One person tries to field it on the rebound, if they make an error they have to touch the wall before someone can pick up the ball and throw it against the wall before the kid can touch it. If the ball hits the wall first, the kid has to stand against the wall and get pegged three times by the person who was able to field it cleanly. We used various balls, but stopped playing once we heard the sound of a baseball rock a kid in the head.
We used to pile into my cousin's basement and smash one another with pillows. I think the name of the game was "avoid the zipper" because if you caught the zipper end of the couch pillow, it was instant tears. We also played hide and seek in the dark, which of course turned into beat the shit out of whoever was it. Awesome.
That was paki-ball to us. Long story. Loved that game We did wall ball too, but called it Red Ass. We had another variant with slightly different rules that I can't remember for the life of me. We had "wrestling" which was inspired by WWF at the time. It was only limited by making sure no one was bleeding at the end of recess. Oh and Dark Tag. Ten people playing tag in a tiny room in a basement with no lighting, with obstacles like ottomans.
We live on a cul-de-sac, one that was shaped like a nine - there was a large circle, and a road led off it to take us back into civilization. When my brother and I were little, we would chase each other on bicycles with sticks, trying to dismount the other, going around and around the circle until one person got tired and quit. Anything went - my brother prefered to jam his stick into my back tire, and I liked to just swing at him. We got more scrapes from that game than anything else combined. Unfortunately, I went into puberty twenty months before he did, and he couldn't keep up. So, he got mad and quit. Pussy.
Giggling guys, stripped from the waist down, and side by side. Ummm, that doesn't really sound like a game I would want to play. Especially when shitting was involved. But to each his own. We used to play a game called "Numbly Peg." The jist of the game was you'd stand with your feet about shoulder length apart and your buddy would throw a knife at your feet from about 20 feet away. It was an incredibly stupid game and my shoes got hit with the butt end of a knife more times then I can count. If you flinched you were a "Fag" and the buddies would beat the dog shit out of you. I think only one of us ever had a knife stuck in his foot, but that tough SOB took it even though he was only 13. He told his parents that he caught his foot on a rock while swimming.
Spray the Bidet -- This game is fairly simple, though highly situational. The game is initiated when your friends come over to your house and ask, because they do not live in a house formerly populated by effeminate Frenchman, what that little bathtub thing is in the bathroom. For the uninitiated, a bidet is a substitute for toilet paper. Instead of cleaning yourself with toilet paper, some people prefer a forceful column of water with the strength of a firehose. The water is emitted from a fountain-like spout and is controlled by three knobs: hot, cold, and pressure. When I said the bidet had the potency of a firehose, I was only half kidding. It was impossible to truly know how hard it could shoot water because the ceiling twelve feet above the spout always got in the way. The game is played when you attempt to get your friend to look over the spout long enough to spray them in the face with the full fury of Poseidon's wrath. Superman -- We had a lot of sectional couches with removable cushions. Everyone knows these are ideal for building forts. What everyone does not know is that the bottom cushions fit perfectly over stairs. So long as one has enough cushions to adequately cover the stairs and the floor at the bottom, they can have hours of fun. The game is simple -- just jump down the stairs. Variants include one of the best arenas for king of the hill you can imagine, forcing your little cousin into a sleeping bag then tossing him down the stairs, and rubbermaid tub sledding.
My cousins and I played that at my grandmas in her living room. We called it "ghost in the graveyard" Not only was it dark so it was hard to see, but the person who was "it" had to be blindfolded and had to walk around the room trying to tag the other people who weren't. It's amazing that with all the breakables she had in her living room that we managed to never break anything of much value...like all of her china in her hutch or the many precious moments figurines on shelves. I grew up in a small town, technically a village, and around 11-14 about 30 of us neighborhood kids would play massive games of tag at night around our whole town. Our town was built around a central park so the tennis court in the middle was our "jail" and we'd split up into 2 teams, one team would hide and the others would try and find them or watch the jail. When found you weren't caught until you were forcefully dragged from where ever you were caught and into the tennis court. Your teamates could also break you out of jail provided they could get in, tag you and both get out before being caught by the other team. Me and another friend also played "hit cars driving two blocks away with our massive water balloon launcher". That game ended when I saw a little kid riding his bicycle about a block away from us, and I launched a water balloon at him, across the entire park, and hit him square in the face. His mom walking about 20 steps behind him was pissed.
I always thought this was a common thing, but I don't know anyone else whose friends ever did it: sleeping bag wars. Basically, when we would have sleepovers at someone's house with at least 4 of us or so, we would take our sleeping bags, put them on upside down so that we couldn't see anything, and proceed to beat the everloving shit out of each other. The sleeping bags provided enough cushion to prevent most serious injuries, and it was a good way to take out any extra aggression without getting personal. Those were the days.
Focus: When I was in elementary school, a game called "Bloody Knuckles" was very popular. It consisted of two people facing each other with closed fists trying to rap each other on the knuckles. Depending how fast your reflexes were, you could end up with hands that looked like they had been run over by a truck. It was one of the few games I was actually good at. Not only did it test and improve hand/eye coordination, it also raised your pain threshold and desensitized you to the sight of blood. A second variation of this involved using a quarter (I'm fuzzy on the details) but suffice it to say, losing that version hurt like a bitch. Another game that I saw (but never played) was splaying your hand flat on a table or solid surface that wouldn't scratch easily, and spreading your fingers as wide as possible, and using a pencil/pen, or extreme cases a knife. The object of this game a.k.a accident waiting to happen, was to tap the space in between your fingers as fast as possible without stabbing yourself. Jesus, I just realized how fucked up my childhood was....
I can't be the only one who has been unfortunate to get involved in a game of "ball tag". *Smack your buddy in the balls* "Ball tag, you're it!" And just to clarify, the nut shot would have to be a surprise in the hallway or while waiting in the lunch line or something. It's not like we were all in a circle smacking around each others shit. The game lasted throughout junior high and into high school and there was no clear winner. Only a lot of losers. We were very very stupid boys. And now we're probably very very sterile men.
I grew up in a neighborhood bordered by an open field / park area. When the sun started to set we would gather all the kids we could find and play big games of capture the flag. I always thought it was a blast. As we got older instead of capture the flag in the woods it became bottle rocket wars, and I have a few burns that can still be seen somewhat from that.
We used to play cops and robbers during recess. Cops were selected prior to recess (usually people who had been in prison at the end of recess yesterday) and would search for robbers, meaning anyone else. Then cops would drag them to prison, which were the baseball dugouts. You could break people out of prison by tagging them out. Eventually, certain ten year olds were upset they could not be cops all the time. Rather than just "not playing" they opted to cry to the school counselor (we went to a cushy touchy-feely school) who rather than telling them to "suck it up" made a complex "fair" rotating system of "cops" and "robbers" for the entire fifth grade. Because a four-year degree in sociology apparently leads to belief in solving the minor issues of ten year olds with something other than the words: "deal with it". Eventually being on the same rotation all the time, lead to us forming little gangs who became competitive and argumentative outside of the game and tag got banned. Thanks you communist whore! Our solution was a new game called "throw rocks at the other team". There was a big dirt pile behind our school that had lots of dirt clods and rocks. If we couldn't play a tag game we could certainly just play cops and robbers with a new twist. We played a rough version of king of the hill where you threw rocks at eachother, and don't let the adults see it. I think those were the only rules. Alex Wolfe: Rubbermaid tub sledding and sleeping bag sledding were the best, there was a bloodstain on the carpet of the house I grew up in from overshooting the stair on my b-day and eating shit into the kitchen wall till we moved!
I use to play the quarter game. You would start spinning a quarter on the table. The person to your left had to keep it going. If you stopped the quarters spin, you lost. You had to put both fists down on the table and one person shot the quarter as hard as they could towards your knuckles. It wasn't nearly as extreme as some of these games but it did draw quite a bit of blood and could sting a bit. EDIT: And similar to the ball tag game, there was always the Tipper Tuesday game. Which was played mostly in my middle school/ early high school years and I for the most part tried to stay away from. Who likes having their newly found fun stick "tipped" every Tuesday?