What games did you play when you were younger?

I loved playing house with my little sister but Barbies was our favorite game to play, we could play with our Barbies for hours on end, sometimes the little world we made up would last weeks. We still talk about it and laugh about the great times we had with our Barbie Dolls.

Honestly, when we get together (she lives 4 hours away) we’ll make a stop at Toys R’ Us just to see what new fancy Barbies they have out these days ;) – LB

twister! we would spend hours playing that game!

We loved playing spud and horse, and lots of football!

Kick the can
hide and seek
Bloody murder (a nighttime version of hide and seek)
we played house, with our baby dolls and kitchen set
lots of board games
my brother had a cool train set
Lincoln Logs
Legos
Dress up with moms old clothes
we pretended that our bikes were horses and we were in the wild west.

Marbles. I was great!

And card games with hockey and baseball cards, in season.

“Super Duper Slipper Slide”, which was basically me and my brother playing tag around the coffee table, in our socks, on the waxed wood floor.

Catwoman! From Batman and Robin!!!

@Harp I have never used a Slip & Slide! I have always wanted to! My sister and I used to practice ice skating for the Olympics in our socks on wooden floors.
@ElleBee My sister and I do Toys R’ Us trips whenever we can too!
@scamp what is spud?

Hide&seek tag, freeze tag, capture the flag, kickball, P.I.G.

Stickball, foursquare, stoop-ball, baseball-card flipping, coin-tossing, Mother May I, duck,duck,goose…

French lazertag.

Doctor.

My girlfriend and I loved playing “teenagers” when we were young, acting out long, imaginative stories about being “grown-up.” Also tag, jumping rope, “mother may I”, climbing trees (and teddy bear picnics in trees.) Boy, the days were so much longer back then, weren’t they?

All the games I played to place at the gym (gymnastics gym). We’d see who could do handspring sprints the fastest I always won, ha :). Who could climb the robe the most times in a row… Occasionally, we’d play a hide and go seek game with the mats and in the pit.

Anyone have a time machine?

Freeze Tag, Four Square, Duck Duck Goose, Rock School*, double-dutch jump-rope, hide and go seek, Red Rover, Simon Says, Captain May I, and a lot of hand-clapping games like Miss Mary Mack. Go Fish, gin rummy, Trouble (with the pop-o-matic!), drawing and coloring, and in autumn, we’d gather all the chestnuts that had fallen and bunch up the leaves like forts and sling chestnuts at each other.

We had Slip n’ Slides, too! Big Wheel races, Doctor (who didn’t?), tea parties, and what I guess you’d call real life Rock Band. We’d sing the latest songs we knew (as far as we knew the lyrics) and bang on pots or bring out our toy instruments and play them, like tambourines and so on.

Oh, and we’d get blankets and refrigerator boxes and make a fort or a castle!

* I should explain Rock School. You need a small rock and a set of stairs. One person is the “teacher”. Everyone else starts on the bottom step. The “teacher” has a small rock or pebble and each “student” must guess in which hand the rock is in. Those who get it right advance up a step. The one who gets to the top first wins and becomes the new teacher. We had 13 front steps outside our house, which was perfect for the game.

Sledding down steep hills, making forts, or rolling down a grassy hill with several friends in large cardboard boxes. Boxes are the best free material for childhood imaginations!

Bob Sled was always fun, going down the carpeted stairs in a sleeping bag.

Knee Football was great, indoors, plush football, had to stay on your knees.

American Gladiators, Assault was always the best, we’d have a target on the wall and there would be different Nerf guns between barriers made of sofas cushions and chairs.

Oh, how could I have forgotten Ring-a-leevio – kind of like hide-and-go-seek on steroids.

@simone54 I loved Bob Sled!!!

Indoor Camping in the living room was fun for sleepovers! Using big blankets & sheets and covering the living furniture (with a tall stool in the middle), using clothespins to secure the borders. Having an indoor picnic for dinner inside of the tent made it even better. Then finishing off the night in the darkness with flashlights and shadow puppets.

Oh man, I remember playing “Farm” with my friend. We’d get a giant box of wooden blocks and plastic shapes and arrange them into a farm. Then we’d go out, and pick a bunch of different plants and pretend they’re animals. The long green lilly leaves were crocodiles, the little yellow buds were chickens, etc.

I just got a nostalgia dropkick to the face.

I liked this trampoline game we played called “Popcorn.” Most of the kids curl their arms around their legs kinda squatted down in a fetal position. Some other kid jumps and tries to make them let go and pop open. The last one to pop open gets to bounce the popcorn kernels the next turn.

I also played a game called “Annie Over” which my papa taught me. My sister and I played it like this. We each get on opposite sides of the barn. One kid has a tennis ball. The person with the ball hollers “ANNIE!’ and the other person on the other side of the barn hollers “OVER!” Then you throw the ball over the roof to the other side. Then the object is to run around the barn to the opposite side which is your base after you throw without the other person tagging or peggging you with the ball.

olly olly oxen free?! or whatever the heck its called. ghost in the graveyard. who can hang upside down from a tree for the longest time.

i miss those days.

@buster I also played that ball game at grandma’s house. The barn was too big for us to throw the ball over so we used the wood shed.

pretend the floor is lava, use couch cushions and other things to move from place to place

@Ansible1 THE FLOOR IS LAVA!!!!!!!!! omg. how did i forget that. those 4 words are my childhood in a nut shell.

I always liked playing Post Office; so much so that now I’m living it.

We played a live-action version of Pac Man with Kix cereal lined up around the living room. We also did really nerdy things like created our own newspaper, and radio show, complete with commercials.

My friends and I basically LARPed a lot—coming up with games (with magic and whatnot) and characters and playing them. They often lasted for a long time and were lots of fun!

We played a game we named Obstacle Course; creative name, I know.

I grew up in an area with lots of apartments and they were all connected by walls and gates and large parking lots. We had a route that led through 4 apartment buildings. We would hop fences, jump walls, jump on large trash cans, run through parking lots and we would time each other. The winner picked the next game we played.

There was also hide and seek, hopscotch and tag.

We played a little game called “Just the Tip…”

… oh wait, not the kind of game I think you’re looking for.

Well, I don’t know if it’s really a “game”, but we called it that when we were younger: my sister and I used to play school all the time. It was a lot of fun.

I also played Digimon with my brother. I know you didn’t want board games, but my brother and I actually created our own board games and we played them.

We also made up our own card games and our own handball-variation games. My siblings and I used to organize an Olympics-type thing during the summer (it was non-competitive really, just for fun) where we had a series of little “events” and we would write down the list and do them in order. Hella fun. :) I remember one of the most fun events was one I came up with where I made little squares of paper with the numbers 1–50 on them and they were hidden around the yard in various places and you had to squirt each one in order using a super-soaker. My brother loved that one and was always begging me to do it again. :P

I’ve also done all kinds of imaginary things with friends and siblings, like pretending we were exploring ancient city or something. Also, cardboard spaceships for the win. Of course, I being the weird kid that I was had the most fun drawing all the buttons and gauges and gadgets on the “console”. :)

I remember that my siblings and I would reinact a lot of movies and shows. The one that I can really remember is our reinactment of Gone with the Wind. We each had our characters and everyday we would do different scenes or make up our own. Me and my sister took blankets and wraped them around us to create dresses. I miss those days so much!
Even though I’m fairly young my family didn’t have a lot of video games and things like that so we made up activities to entertain ourselves we lived on 40 acres and didn’t have kids near us at all to play with. I remember us making a stand by our little dirt road and giving away flowers for “free” but people thought we were so cute and sweet giving away flowers for free they would end up paying us for them. That was a good summer :)
Ok I’m going to stop now because I loved my childhood so much I could go on and on about it!

Skully (skelzies), Handball, Slugs, Suicide (bottoms up), Stickball, Manhunt, Tag, Let’s get high… etc.

Kick¡ball, freeze tag, hide and seek, twister, slip and slide… and were i grew up we were taught to play golf and tennis from a very early age. I also loved playing doctor!

OMG, how could I forget kickball? Even adults have a league that plays in WIlliamsburg, for Bob’s sake.

Is it bad that I just want to go out and play all these now?

Monopoly.

@mattbrowne RULE BREAKER!!!!

@J0E – Ah, I should have read the details more carefully. Made up? Hmm. When I was very young we dug holes in the ground trying to end up in Australia. Deepest hole won. Well, I should add that no one made it to Australia. We remained stuck in Europe.

@mattbrowne HA! That brings back memories of my grandparents allowing me to dig holes to China! ;D (I’m still here in Wisconsin)

@SpatzieLover – Had we both succeeded maybe we would have meet at the very center of the Earth. Some people love hot climate ;-)

@mattbrowne Could we create a tunnel from the States to Europe? ;)

@SpatzieLover – Actually, some scientists play with the idea seriously. To make the tunnel really useful there would be a vacuum inside it. We could send trains into the tunnel almost “for free”. They would be accelerated and decelerated by gravity. Some folks want this kind of tunnel to connect the US west and east coast. How does Wisconsin fit into this picture?

@mattbrowne I’m in the midwest. I’d guess they’d go through Indiana to get to from coast to coast…which is close enough for me ;D Hey, I learned something new today. Who knew actual scientists toyed with childhood fantasies like tunneling?!

We used to play ‘Japs and Commandos’ sometimes called ‘Britishers and Jerries’ where we pretended to shoot each other in the woods. Most of the games I thought we had made up were actually traditional and went back many generations.

@flutherother Wow. You play the most raciest games.

@simone54 It was a long time ago before the days of political correctness and the Japs, Jerries and Britishers were indistinguishable from one another. We always preferred to be the Britishers of course.