I grew up in Central Florida back when Florida was synonomous with citrus and there were more orange groves than houses. Our neighborhood bordered a fairly large grove and we had a great time having orange fights. Getting hit with an orange at 30 feet hurts. Getting hit by an orange lobbed at 150 feet fucking sucks. I was hit once or twice and got the wind completely knocked out of my sails each time. I grew up with a guy who had a scar on his cheek about the size of a pencil. He got it while playing cowboys and indians. Apparently, the indians had bows and arrows. He was looking around a tree when an arrow entered his cheek and stuck out of his mouth. We had BB gun wars ourselves, but we never shot arrows at each other.
My three brothers and I also played sleeping bag wars, but for us they were called slug wars. We had a variation called Slugs vs. Humans too, same idea as slug wars but two brother were in sleeping bags trying to catch the two brothers not in sleeping bags. Many cheap shots were thrown. We would also play German Spotlight, or Flashlight Tag. It's like manhunt in that it's played at night, but the person who is It has a flashlight and has to shine it on other people for three seconds. My friend had a really big yard with a barn and an orchard, the favorite hiding spot was the roof of the goat pen.
Tackle Spoons: Most people know how to play spoons. It's like musical chairs only with spoons and cards and you're trying to make a book (all the Queens, all the 6's) so you can grab a spoon first and make everyone else scramble for the remaining spoons after you. Normally when you play spoons you sit at a table with the spoons in the middle of the table. Everyone draws, discards, and passes around cards until someone gets a book. When you play at a table you have two kinds of endings to Spoons. The person with the book quietly takes a spoon and pretends to keep playing until everyone else starts sneaking spoons off until there's that ONE person left who's trying to make a book so furiously that they don't notice the spoons are disappearing and they're left without a spoon. Then there's the person who gets the book and just jumps up and grabs a spoon - starting a clawing war for the remaining spoons until one person is left empty handed. Obviously, my cousins and I preferred the violent ending. So, to make it more aggressive, we would put the spoons on the other side of the room. When you saw someone jump up to run to get a spoon, everyone else would jump up and run for a spoon too. There was all manner of tackling, tripping, hair pulling, kidney punching, and elbowing on the way to the spoons. Then it was an all out clawing war once you reached the spoons. The person left without a spoon was usually bruised from the body shots and missing skin across their knuckles.
Wow, not one mention of pencil fights yet. When I was in middle school, this was really popular. The way it was played was two opponents would have one pencil each. One would hold out their pencil horizontally, and the other person would try to break it using only their pencil; sort of a pencil karate chop. The winner got a new pencil from the loser. Certain brands and materials of pencils were better than others. Of course, there would also be money bet on the games as well. Something that my friends and I would do in the highschool parking lot was chicken; if you saw one of your friends walking in the parking lot and you were driving, you would floor it and aim straight for them. If you were the victim, the object was to either stand your ground and hope that the driver's brakes and reflexes were good enough to stop the car in time, OR you could be the ultimate badass and jump onto the hood of the car. One of my crazier friends did the hood jump one time, but my friend driving decided to just go faster and start doing figure-8s in the parking lot while the poor dumbass was hanging onto the windshield wipers! The security gaurds at our school hated it when we would do that.
My childhood best friend and I would play games of such atrocious violence, I am surprised that either of us are still alive right now. To name a few: One time, when roller blades first became popular we wanted to see exactly how fast we could go on them. So I put on the roller blades and he got on his bicycle and I held onto the back. Did we have any type of safety equipment? Of course not. That's not fun at all. He proceeded to go as fast as he could on the bike and headed straight for an area with a few inches of wet sand piled up from a rain earlier that day. My roller blades came to a dead stop from about 15 miles per hour and I launched forward about 8 feet landing on my hands and face on asphalt. Then, we switched. One more than one occasion, we would have sword fights up in a tree. The game was simple. We would both climb this massive tree in his front yard. Find area of marginal stability, get out our plastic swords and beat the shit out of each other. The fear of falling and breaking both of your legs made this game seem like more than just a game. I just moved in with this friend about 3 weeks ago.
I've always known that game as Kill the Dil with the Pill. At our school we played The Game. A big shade cloth covered almost the whole main concrete area where we spent recess and lunch. The Game involves throwing an object (tennis ball, water bottle, anything round really) onto the shade cloth, and then catching it when it roll off. The winner receiving the honor of being the one to throw the object up there next. This game would invariably end up violent, elbows thrown, pushes in the back and the occasional bloody knee. The Game led to another game we created. This one didn't even have a name. Someone was designated "in". To stop being in, the person had to stamp on someone else's foot, then that new person would be in. The fun part? Whoever wasn't in was allowed to kick the person who was in, in the ass, while they were trying to stamp on your/other people's feet. This was awesome because everyone would end up staying in a really small circle so they could kick the guy in the ass, who would obviously get angrier and angrier the longer he stayed in. Hilarious.
I have a game. I've never played it, but I heard about it from a gay couple in New Orleans a few years ago. Its called Schnoodle. Brace yourselves. Schnoodling consists of two guys rubbing their wieners together. The one who gets hard first loses, or wins. I'm not sure. While researching this post I found that Schnoodling has many weird definitions in urban dictionary.http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schnoodling. Some of these are gayer than the game I mentioned.
Back in the day we called this Playing Doctor. By the time I was 7, none of the moms on the street would let their daughters play with me unsupervised. Focus: About a dozen of us would play war, that consisted of running through the woods shooting BB guns, bottle rockets, and whistlers at each other, and lobbing firecrackers or M-80s. It still amazes me that no one lost an eye or their hearing. Opposing teams would set up anbushes and try to sneak up on the other team. It was actually pretty nerve wracking when you were the ambushee, not knowing when a bottle rocket would come bouncing off the side of your skull. Just the sound of a sizzle and a whoosh heading in your direction before all hell broke loose.
British Bulldog was a playground favourite at school. The nurse's office was in a building overlooking the playground, almost every morning assembly involved a final note from the nurse saying that she would no longer treat the scraped knees and elbows of pupils who had been playing British Bulldog. Sadly, the game has been banned from the school I went to. I knows this as a good friend now teaches there and from what he tells me, most of our favourite games are forbidden. Sports games however, were greatly encouraged. With the exception of football, as it was seen as a hooligan's sport and thus never allowed at the school. Many of us would move the bins in the main school yard and play hand cricket, (Think stick ball, but based on cricket, and using the palm of your hand instead of a stick). Eventually, we were allowed access to the school's cricket equipment during break and lunch time and use the paddock, as the hand ball game resulted in a fair number of broken windows. Of course as I grew older, the games changed. Being in a Cathedral school for fourteen years with an hour long service every morning can drain you. So we found ways to keep our spirits up in an otherwise gloomy atmosphere. For some bizarre reason, elder years of school were sat further toward the back of the Nave, with less staff members supervising them. To the point that by the time I was in sixth form, there were sixty of us in the very back, with no staff to keep an eye on us. Some would read a newspaper (I am still yet to find out how one chap managed to read a copy of the The Times every morning without a) being spotted by the Minister and b) being able to turn and fold pages without making a sound) some would catch up on their coursework and others would play cards.
When I was around 6-7 the neighbor girl and I would make elaborate tree houses to play in, we called it, House. Now when I say tree houses I don't mean the standard made of wood off the ground sort I mean rather we would sit between two trees and pull up loads of moss to make a "carpet" and hang out. One day we decided to expand our home and include a bathroom and seeing as I was a huge tom boy with absolutely no shame I decided I was going to use our newly made bathroom to poop. I don't know what was going through my head at the time as the woods we were in was in plain site of many homes on our street but either way I crouched down to poop and ended up getting it all over myself. At this point I realized I had done something wrong and was terrified to go home so with my 7 year old wisdom I came up with a plan to fix the situation so my mom wouldnt find out. I would sneak into another neighbors house, steal some clothes, leave my clothes and no one would be the wiser. Obviously when I came home wearing things that didnt belong to me my mom questioned me on why. I told her I borrowed them from the neighbor girl because I had gotten muddy and for once she actually believed me much to my surprise. (I lied A LOT as a child) Everything was cool until a week later when the neighbor whose clothes I had stolen was over having coffee with my mom and told her "the weirdest" story about how she had found someones clothes covered in shit in her hamper and couldn't for the life of her figure out why or how they got there. Hearing this I ran and hid in the backyard until it was dark and my dad came to find me and to this day my mom hasnt mentioned a word about the incident.
My sister and I use to do the reverse of this. She drove a shitty '86 volvo station wagon that had only 1 redeeming quality. The piece that sprayed the cleaning fluid on the rear window could be turned to face the sidewalk or cars next to you. Anytime you saw someone walking their dog, all you had to do was press the button on the steering column and the people would be covered in glass cleaner. But the most fun came when you would be driving next to someone with their window down and spray them and then stop next to them at the next red light. Good times.
No one else here has ever hollowed out road side snow banks to use as camoflauge while throwing snowballs at cars?
Seems to be a lot of "throwing stuff at each other" games. I played Let's Throw Rocks At Each Other one time when I was five, at the racetrack in Brainerd. We were in the tunnel that goes between the infield and the paddock, just chucking rocks at each other. The kid I was playing with yelled down, "This one's really sharp! I'm gonna get you with it!" HAHA, DO IT. He ended up clipping me in the side of the head, a good three inch gash right above my temple. He made a Home Alone type face, screamed, and ran away crying. Never saw him again. We made up a game in my neighborhood. I don't think we named it. I don't even particularly remember the rules. I remember it stretched out over the several blocks of the neighborhood, there were many bases involved, all of which had boards games in them for some reason. It also incorporated a fucking shit ton of those origami throwing stars. Pelt was the big one in eighth grade. Get a big circle of kids playing hacky sack. The group has to get at least three hacks in a row for it to be considered an official try. After the first three, anyone who got five solo hacks in a row could then catch it and wail it at anyone they wanted. If anybody touched the sack with their hands, they better take off running, they were about to get pelted. I seem to remember there being a rule about stalls, but I don't remember it.
Gator Boarding Get one of these and a snowboard Brother holds a rope and tries to ride the snowboard behind while you're trying to make him eat grass. Kinda like tubing except instead of water you're driving on grass. Or we would get airsoft guns, put three brothers in the Gator and have one on an ATV and try to shoot/run over/stop the other vehicle and its passengers. My parents hated these games. Dad because it tore up the lawn, Mom because we were recklessly driving motor vehicles with the intent on injuring each other.
Bloody Knuckles In junior high we would take a quarter and flick it to make it spin, and then we took turns flicking it, until someone knocked the quarter over. The loser would then put their fist down on the desk or table and have the quarter slid by the winners thumb at a powerful rate. The game lived up to its name. My parents were like "Why are you knuckles bloody?"
That's possibly the most vile form of amusement I've ever heard described. But I must say, I'm damn glad to see the move hasn't changed the level of discourse here. (I just registered. Congrats on getting this place up and running. I tip this glass of Bombay in your direction.)
On behalf of everyone else, I look forward to anything you contribute here. Anything you write is a treat. By the way, I took a trip to Oklahoma to visit a friend recently. Between the flights there and back, I reread you book. Twice. Fun times.