Gymnasium Golf Ever hit a golf ball in your basement with a 3 wood? That was the genesis. I tried it once. It was so awesome, and scary, and fun that me and a buddy decided to move it to the school gymnasium. (you could rent our gym for free on the weekends) 5 guys running around in motorcycle helmets and snowsuits trying to find the elusive golf ball. Greatness. Watching a 6 foot 6 buddy get knocked on his ass from taking a golf ball to the helmet.... Steak.Balls. Rules: There were no rules. It was a combination of Golf, Smear the Queer, and Baseball. If you caught/recovered the ball and made it to the T-box you got to hit the golf ball with the 3 wood. Wooohoooo Sure a stupid name, but a super fun game. The game was simple, you calmly walked into a convenience store, grabbed a case of beer, or 12 pack, or whatever you wanted to drink, stepped up to the counter, looked directly at the clerk and screamed "WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO", then ran out to the car that was full of your buddies egging you on. Rules: The game got tough when you dropped something. For every beer dropped the getaway car drove a block away. I'll never forget a friend of mine dropping a 12 pack running from the Paki working the counter, beers going everywhere, as the driver started driving away emphatically stating.... "Fuck em.... Rules are rules... 12 blocks."
Great thread. We had a 20 acre walnut orchard near the home I grew up. After the harvest there were always plenty of walnuts that had not been shaken off the trees. This of course led to "Walnut Wars" basically capture the flag with the walnuts being used to throw and hit your opponent. I am not sure if a flag was ever captured as most of the time you just wanted to wail a fastball at someone who just nailed you. If the farmer came out then it was all 10 to 20 kids playing running back to their homes. I thought I was pretty tough to be able to do that, until my father talked about playing tackle football on concrete. Ok dad, you win.
We had bloody knuckles when I was in middle school but the rules were different. One person started and hit the other in the knuckles but they are not allowed to move their hands or they lost. Then it was the other person's turn. A lot more damage that way, smart.
We used to play hand ball, with a tennis ball on some concrete squares. As the high school years went by though, it became rather mundane, and our creativity in woodworking classes produced some wooden bats, about 12"x6" with a handle on them. They were made of hardwood and quite heavy, and could launch a tennis ball nearly as far as a tennis racquet could. Now the handball squares weren't huge, so belting tennis balls at each other soon sharpened up our reaction times and tolerance to being hit by high speed tennis balls, but our interest in this eventually waned also. Then one day, someone found a golf ball, and it was clearly the best idea ever to substitute it for the tennis ball in our shenanigans. It was like Olympic-level table-tennis; once a rally got going, all players had to stand way behind their square to be able to hit the ball in the opponents square. It is a miracle nobody got hit in the head or had some teeth knocked out. I think it only took one lunchtime of playing this game to realise the imminent injuries, and the tennis ball was brought back into service. When high school kids stop to think "maybe this isn't a good idea...", you know it really isn't.
We called it Smear the Queer or Kill the Man. Our twist was that the youngest or newest player(s) would always "somehow" wind up with the ball and get smeared or killed until he/they quit. Whoever had made the most tackles won. *** In junior high, my friend and his brothers would see who could go the longest without pooping. According to them, the longer you waited, the greener the turd. Don't know the name of their game or if it's true.
Diver Dan We used to play Diver Dan. This game works by taking the pillows and cushions from every bed, chair or couch in the entire house and piling them up on the floor in front of your bunk bed. Then, with your siblings and cousins, you take turns hurling your body from the top bunk onto the pile. It's awesome, probably because there's a certain element of danger when you have a bunch of 4-10 year olds diving headfirst into the ground from a pretty decent height. When I was 7, we moved to a new house that had at least 15 steps leading to the basement. But the steps had a little landing at the bottom and then curved 90 degrees and then went down another few steps. But behind the landing was a wall. That's when shit got serious. It was a total utopia for the world of Diver Dan as long as you didn't overshoot your mark and hit the wall. Sure enough, on probably my third jump, I hit the wall. And I didn't bounce back. This is because I landed with my front teeth and knee lodged deeply into the wall of our beautiful new home. And that concludes the story of the last time we got to play Diver Dan. We lived in that house for another 10 years or so, and I remember gauging how much I had grown by comparing against the the teeth and knee holes in the wall at the bottom of the steps. Like a white trash growth chart....
We played most of the game already posted but also used to play two great games. Building site wars & tree bungy. Building site wars was awesome. We would go to a house that was being built (there were heaps when I was growing up) and all go to separate parts of the house, pick up building materials like chucks of brick or bent wire and run around throwing them at each other. Every single game ended with tears and every single one of us got stiches at least once. Tree bungy was also good fun. We used to climb on the roof of a house or the school, run and jump off into a large conifer tree… the branches flexed and as long as you landed in the tree would roll you relatively safely to the floor. People used to get some nasty cuts and scratches from the branches but we all had a good time. The game stopped when we got a little bigger and my friend broke his arm.
I don't think it had a name but, we used to get two soda or beer cans and tie a piece of fishing line between them. We'd put one can in a mailbox on one side of the street and run it to another mailbox across the street. When a car would go by it would hit the fishing line and drag the cans behind. We would sit in the bushes and laugh while the drivers lost their minds. Then we started putting gravel in the cans. People started losing their minds a little bit more. And of course, dog shit had to be spread on top of the cans. Jesus, the look of disgust and their squealing was fucking hilarious. Of course we got busted. But, I'm thinking that I won't now. I've got some fishing line here somewhere..
My brother, friends and I used to play the "Spoke Game". We'd have our bicycles out. Two people would get sticks, and two people would ride the bikes, back and forth up and down the road. As the kids on the bikes passed the kids with the sticks, the objective was the ram the stick into the front spokes of the bike, stopping (sending them flying over the handlebars) the kid on the bike. If you stopped him, you got to ride the bike next. My dad always wondered why our spokes were always bent, and got really pissed off. Where I come from, there is a lot of snow. The funnest thing, EVER, and I mean this... Is to tow GT's (three ski's) behind either the snowmobile or the quad, with ropes. We often had two GT's and one driver on the quad/ski-doo. A couple times we had three GT's behind the quad/ski-doo. The objective was to make the person next to you fall off his GT, by either ramming, pushing, hitting, or lifting one of his back skis then dropping him. When we had three people, the person in the middle always got fucked up first. We went through a lot of GT's, because the skis would always fall off, the stearing wheel would break, or what ever. We ended up bolting a lot of skis back on, and changing plastic seats with other things, like pillows with straps. If there were too many kids, and not enough GTs someone would have to ride bitch on the quad. To pass the boredom, he would pull on the ropes pulling the GT's until they were right up behind the quad, then let go. The result, obviously, is whiplash and hilarity. It's also very fun when you have a dog that chases you and likes to bite you.
We used to play the quarters game in middle school, with one minor difference. To enter the game you had to stake a bet, a quarter bet was played till the first blood - the bleeder had to cough up a quarter, a dollar was first to have three signs of blood etc etc. It went as far as one game when it was a $20 bet, and first to 16 bloods; ever major knuckle bleeding then swap to the minor knuckles. The two that played this game looked like they fought 10 rounds with a brick wall.
Mash Pit. Just like smear the queer, but with no ball so you could hit anyone at any time. Got the explosive tackles up and taught us to keep your head on a swivel because some pussy would always go for the blindside kidney shot if you weren't looking. Slingshot paintball. Since none of our parents would buy us paintball guns at age 10, we used slingshots instead. I remember hiding in a thick brush pile one day, exchanging sporadic paint with one of the other kids when one of the 12 year old's managed to sneak up behind me. "Hey buddy." I frantically looked to either side. "Over here jackass." Not a foot from my exposed neck (was only wearing sunglasses) he launched a gobstopper into the back of my head. I got 4 stitches and the fucking thing left pieces of yellow hard shell in the cut so I had to explain myself to the doctor in the ER. My mother subsequently ended ever playing that game again by cutting my slingshot band. Whatever, I tripped him on the asphalt the following week of school, shredding his knees, hands and elbows and receiving my first detention. At age 10.
I played that too! It wasn't a direct teaching, but more a "Man I'm really having fun on the bouncy bridge in the playground, I don't want to get off to go pee, so I'm just going to pee off the side" This lead to people looking and girls saying "thats not what MINE looks like" and sure enough, we would compare parts. This spread like wildfire and before you know it I had compared with all the girls in the KinderCare. To this date that is the only way I've ever seen an Ebony's temptress' honeyhole in person.
I had two sets of boxing gloves and two older brothers, so that usually resulted in some fun times. We were also die-hard pro wrestling fans back in the day, and because of bunk beds we would do ladder matches all the time. I remember one time I Yokozuna banzai squashed my brother's friend 9 times from the top bunk...he started out laughing but by the seventh or eighth one he was crying. I was a more than a few years behind both of my brothers so I couldn't always participate in their games, but I was always the test dummy for whatever moves they just learned watching Monday Night Raw. You bet your ass I was pissed when they started doing Jack Knife powerbombs and gut wrench suplexes.
We used to have dog shit wars in my neighborhood. Pretty simple, really. Get a stick, push it around in a pile of dog shit and try to smack the other person with the stick. No teams, just a random, foul smelling free for all. If you were particularly disgusting, you could just pick up a handful of dog shit and throw it at someone.
We played a game called "gutter golf". I think there were around 100 houses in my neighborhood, and each of them had an water drainage pipe/gulley that ran underneath each end of the driveway. To this day, I still don't know what they are called, but they are about 2 feet in diameter. They were roughly big enough for a small child to crawl through - that much I do know from experience. Anyways, we would basically pick a house in the neighborhood, and then use one of the drainage gulleys as a "hole". But instead of golf balls/clubs, we would just punt soccer balls. It's kind of self-explanatory from there. Another one of our favorite games was called "go over to Brandon's house and look at his dad's Playboys". Again, self-explanatory.
Ding-dong Ditch I grew up in an apartment complex the size of roughly 6 football fields comprising of a dozen buildings and over 600 units, the perfect field for a game like ding-dong ditch. On a regular basis my friends and I, anywhere from 5 to 10 kids, would go around ringing peoples doorbells and running. The game was the most fun during black outs because the hallways would be pitch black, you couldn't see anything. In this case we would all hide at the end of the hallway while one person rang the doorbell, that person would then quietly run over and wait with us. The resident would open the door and, not being able to see past his/her nose, look towards either end of the hallway and see nothing and close the door. This of course was hilarious to a bunch of elementary schoolers.
Butt Ball: We expanded upon the previously mentioned Wall Ball game and decided it didn't have enough people getting pelted. We decided that instead of just throwing the ball at the wall, you had to hit the runner with it. It made everything much more frantic, and damnit, that's the way we liked it. Snowtube Assault: This didn't really have a name, but I think I just gave it a suitable moniker. Inflatable inner tubes were a popular sledding item in my neighborhood. As anyone who's gone sledding knows, walking back up the hill can get incredibly boring. Well to liven this up it became common to do a slide tackle in front of your friend as he was tubing down, subsequently launching him in the air. It was always fun to see just how badly you could make your friend wipe out. Of course if you did it right he'd have himself collected in time do get you back as your paths crossed during your own downhill run.
We used to call Wall Ball "Red Ass", and I actually used to come home with a red ass/back because of it. We also expanded so that every time you fucked up, you lost a letter from "Red Ass". Once you fucked up three times, you got whipped by the ball once by everyone who was playing. Man, we were so fucked! My parents would be like, "Where are all these bruises from?" I was the only girl who played that game at recess, and I fucking loved it. Now that I think about it, maybe this is part of the reason that pain during sex is a thing of mine. Or maybe I'm just fucked, and looking for something to blame. Either way - I wish I could play that game again! Is anyone else as disturbed by Ker-Plunk am I am?!
In college we played a game called "Scrotum." In a public place, someone would say "scrotum" and someone else would say it a little louder. The winner was whoever was willing to say (yell) it the loudest. We played it for the better part of one school year until one day two of my friends were interviewing two girls for their fraternity's calendar in the atrium of one of the academic buildings. I happened to walk by and nodded to them. As I rounded the corner into the hallway, I said "scrotum" just loud enough for them to hear me. I doubt the girls even picked up on it. Neither of them was brave enough to say it back - the girls were hot and the guys were engineering majors. They came to my room later and declared me the ultimate winner, and we basically quit playing after that.