What memorable games did you play as a child?

We used to pretend that we were horses (don’t hate), and gallop around and pretend to eat grass.

@Jude Aww that’s really cute!

I used this one room in my house to create an entire world inhabited by either action figures or Legos, which should constitute as a massive role-playing game. I had full story-lines, action, relationships, and names for all the places, on a kid’s level, of course. Nothing was original at all, but it was fun.. I should totally start doing that again now that I’m capable of originality…

My bedroom had a window overlooking the entire bay area. I put my desk next to it, and would daydream of flying a spaceship.

@ddude1116 That sounds pretty exciting!

@filmfann I still do that ;)

Basketball. Football. Boxing.

We played this game called “Pie.” It was a type of tag, and I have no idea where it came from. There was a pie witch and a pie fairy and then all the other players. The Pie Witch went and hid behind a tree which was also “home.” The Pie Fairy assigned each other player a type of pie. She would tell the Pie Witch to come out and the Pie Witch would start to say names of different pies. If she said your pie name, you had to run away from the witch and go to home base. If you got tagged, you were the next witch. If you got to home base without being tagged, you were the next Pie Fairy and the current witch remained in her role. With the previous fairy becoming a regular player. I’ve never heard of anyone else playing this game and I wonder if one of my sisters “invented” it and passed it down.

The floor is lava!

Pokemon cards!

My friends and I didn’t know the rules at first, so just made rules up as we played. It was fascinating.

The usual outside games like tag.
Then there was “Go ahead…beat my ass!” invented by my lovely and gracious sister. XD

We lived just in front of a big field of weeds. I beat down the weeds into a little trail and made bigger spaces that were rooms. I had all of the rooms of a normal house. It was a secret and the entrance was hard to find and, if you did find it, was hard to get through. I eventually ‘invited’ two neighborhood friends in there and it was no fun anymore.

We also played girls v boys war with buckeyes as ammunition, though I don’t think we threw them at each other after the first time we were caught by a parent. Stealthy acquisition of the other side’s buckeyes was crucial – the person with the most buckeyes was currently winning. The boys’ home base was the playhouse in a boy’s backyard a few houses down from mine and the girls’ was my playhouse. Making things interesting was that one of the neighbors in between didn’t want us in his yard so we had to avoid it OR take a very big risk.

Soldier and tag. Double-dutch jump rope. Roller skating on the sidewalks. Making a nightlight out of a jar of fireflies. Playing doctor . (;

Our parents had a croquet set and a front yard perfect for a killer croquet course. When a game lasted longer than the sunlight, Dad would set up floodlights. The yard was also ideal for kick-the-can. At least a dozen neighborhood kids would show up.

With the other girls, a favorite was Chinese jump rope. The ropes were made by linking rubber bands together to form a large loop. We would practice alone by setting up two chairs and looping the rope around the chair legs. Gracious, that was fun. Does anyone still play this game?

Street baseball/football, checker and chess.

We played the often-banned-by-teachers “British Bulldogs.” Basically everyone stands on one side of the field, with one kid being ‘it’ in the middle. Everyone runs to the other side, and anyone tagged stays in the middle, ready to tag on the next round. Kind of like a schoolyard zombie apocalypse. If there were no bloody noses, you weren’t playing it right.

I got to say the best things were when we played Capture the Flag, we took over the entire neighborhood to play. Oh but then there were the street hockey games too, or the ice hockey on the back pond. Always something fun going on.

I recall one particular game of Kick the Can where I was the last person “out”, and not yet caught and corralled by the “it”. When he finally found where I was, we had a breakneck race through the woods and down a hill and I beat him to kick the can about a half-step ahead of him.

With my sisters I played a strange game we invented called “Monster or Muffin” that I could not even have explained then, and I certainly won’t try now.

@WasCy Oh my gosh! I used to play Kick the Can too!

I was influenced by a lot of fantasy related stuff, like The Sword in the Stone or video games like Keith Courage in Alpha Zones or Ninja Spirit.
I’d go outside in the woods down by the river, or jump around on snow banks during Winter, pretending to be going on epic quests with my little branch that was either a magic staff or a sword, fighting stuff and getting help from fairies and witches. It was pretty awesome, because there’s lots of snow in Canada, and jumping from one bank to the other in between sidewalks and stuff really made it feel like a video game. And when I failed and fell in snow and a bunch of it came falling down due to my crashing into it, in my head it was mountains of rocks and stuff.
I also remember doing that while waiting for the city bus on the way home from school. It took forever to get there, so plenty of time to kill…the bus was usually this badass giant Viking ship that took me home after a hard day of fighting goblins and dragons and crap.
Then when I went back inside I drew my adventures on paper. My dad’s old black and white Conan the Barbarian comics also offered much fuel to my imagination.

I also had this game where I’d go out in parking lots, grocery stores and things, and pick out one person. So I spied and followed this person lol, until they got in their car, or went home on foot and whatnot. In my head I was a vampire seeking her next victim lol, I had a blast doing that. I usually played the rest of the adventure out in alleys or playgrounds after my ’‘victim’’ got safely home, which was usually me marrying the person, or killing them lol.
That was memorable because even when I was young, I’d stay out pretty late until it got pretty dark, much to my dad’s dismay haha. But the evening provided a lot for someone who was poor and had no friends. XD

I even tried to write a book about the vampire adventures, which had about two sentences; On a dark, warm Summer night, footsteps were heard echoing through an empty McDonald’s parking lot.

Erm…something like that. Lmao. But for some reason, I was going to call this story Zombie 1 and I really don’t remember why…it was about vampires.

I recreated many, many, many Star Wars scenes using action figures. Mostly the original trilogy, though, cuz it was re-released around the time of my birth.

I dunno if this counts as a game, but I loved filling a cup with water, putting an action figure in it, and then sticking the whole mess into the freezer. I would then wait for it to freeze completely, and thaw it out. I think it reminded me of the whole carbonite thing from Star Wars, which I was obsessed with…

Anywho, I always made sure they had a limb or two jutting out of the ice, sometimes just their fingers so it looked absolutely awesome…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figure play time. Elaborate fight scenes and intricate story lines…..or so I remember….

Can’t forget lava monster…..rawr.

Bionicles (if that’s how you spell them) I had the most fun with them! Other than that….hitting some balls with bat (no pun intended hahaha) or…other stuff…can’t remember my past much, I don’t really want to…

Lego Star Wars!

Doctors & nurses…...you know, show me yours & i’ll show you mine kind of vibe. I had tons of bandages & sticky plasters.

I had these storage boxes with covers that looked a little bit like shells, so my friends and I would strap the covers onto our backs with bungee cords and roam around playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The kids in my nrighborhood played King Arthur a lot, and Robin Hood, and Cowboys & Cowgirls. I was responsible for making up the storylines and assigning parts.

We also played Circus, involving a lot of backyard acrobatics. My father made me a trapeze that hung from a branch of a huge old maple, and a long plank between two piles of wooden milk crates serves as a tightrope. Any game with animals (lions, rabbits, seals, whatever) involved the use of a whip, which was obtained by a hit-and-run trespass of a yard with a big old willow tree in it; braving the scolding of the woman who lived there was part of the challenge, and it was worth it for the fine, flexible stripped willow branches we obtained.

There were also girl games involving bouncing a ball or swinging a jumprope and chanting or singing the proper rhymes.

I don’t know that anything was really more fun than Dress-Up. My mother maintained a box of old clothes, accessories, and raw materials, and a gang of us would outfit ourselves and parade around, making up stories that fit our attire. The dress-up box also supplied costumes for King Arthur, Robin Hood, etc.

@Jeruba Your post was beautiful. Thank you for sharing. It was so vivid that it takes me back to my childhood when roaming the local area and imagination could create many scenarios without judgement.

My friends and I also adored ‘dress-up’. Mom kept a box in the attic filled with old clothes and costumes. It was years before I discovered that one of the items, a slinky white dress with large shoulder pads and a wide, gold sequined strap across the waist, was Mom’s wedding gown.

@Pied_Pfeffer, my mother’s wedding gown was in the box too. I knew what it was and loved to put it on. Bring a practical sort, my mother must have decided that letting it be used for imaginative games was a much better way to extract its full value than leaving it to lie in a closet after a single wearing.

Here are my brother and I, outfitted for one of our medieval fantasy games. Sometimes we appropriated my mother’s silk scarves for capes, but I think this one that my brother is wearing was made from an old curtain.