JCC Tell us about the games you used to make up as a kid.

Stuff you used to make up. So generally not video games or board games made by some business, something you created with your imagination.

My siblings and I used to play a game we called "Dark". Basically just hide and go seek in the house, except in the dark (lights turned off), with the seeker wearing a blindfold.

The seeker would wait in the bathroom and count off a minute to give the others time to hide, then they would go seek, feeling around like a blind person. It was fun to watching your idiot sibling stumble around blind and walk into things. The goal for the seeker was to make physical contact with the hiders. You know, while blindfolded. Last hider wins.

Because our house was quite small, choke points could be set up to prevent people from just running around you. You could just spread your arms and try to cut off hallways or doorways. We would throw things at the seeker because it was funny to hit a blindfolded person in the face. One time my brother pelted me with pillows as I was walking by the stairs and I fell down the stairs. That's like when you use physics to knock someone off a cliff in a video game, it's like an indirect kill. We used to play in the basement and we'd end up walking into a support pole or the damn furnace. My unbeatable hiding spots were inside the clothes dryer and underneath the bottom basement stair (it was just a board running horizontally, I would squeeze under it and lie flat). Oh and I would cheat all the time and look down the bottom of the blindfold while pretending I wasn't able to see...so eventually my siblings got something bigger to cover more of my face and then tied it super tight to where it cut into my skin and crushed my nose. I think most of the fun was in the potential for someone to get hurt.

So tell us about the lame little games you nerds used to make up.

Also, the waters of your homeworld.

 

So, this was how you abused people that you did’t like?

 

At our school, after the Series 2 episode of Doctor Who which reintroduced the Cybermen, we played Cyberman tag, where if you were caught, you would be 'upgraded' and would become a chaser as well.

 

We didn't create it but it it was the game growing up for us:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butts_Up

 

One time I was was at my friend's house and we were so bored out of our minds that we decided to create "Blocky Hockey" which was inspired by Blobby Volley, a simple volleyball video game with blobs that we used to play a lot. We basically just found some old toy blocks of his and played hockey with them. That's all I can remember.

 

one time i wanted to play with my friend's atari and when he was getting it out of his closet he started swinging the power supply over his head like it was a lasso or something and then totally cracked my skull open with it. so you can see we were very creative, always finding new ways to play with our old toys.

another time when i was camping with my friend we came up with this game in the tent where we would take turns staring at each other but try not to let the other person catch you staring. we called it "eye contact". the thing was every once in a while you would totally let the other person catch you and make a funny face and it was hilarious. but we weren't exactly little at this point, we were in "high" school.

 

Most of the games my friends and I played were based on television shows we watched because we were dumb nerds who deserved to be bullied, honestly.

 

Bedkick.

 

The cousins and I would drop a weighted and baited line into the pond behind granny's farmhouse. We'd wait until a snapping turtle swallowed the line, then we'd drag the turtle out from the bottom of the pond. It hissed and spit like a baby dragon, but cousin Beth would be waiting with a hatchet to chop its head off. Then we'd watch the blood spurt out of its neck and let it walk around a bit until it realized it was dead. After that we went back into the farmhouse to watch The Price is Right with Bob Barker.

 

Me and my cousins use to play "hide from the green man"

The green man was an actual gunmen from the Provisional IRA, who use to patrol the streets where I grew up. Joys of late 80s/early 90s Belfast.

 

We mostly used to take existing games and make up variations that were so esoteric and weird it was impossible to track how they'd evolved from the original. For example, when I was on swim team we'd take up most of the time in between races on meet days playing this card game called Spoons. It's pretty well known I think, but if you don't know it, the important thing is that there's one fewer spoon than there are people and you lose if you don't have a spoon. The game-winning mechanic involves getting a certain hand and sneakily taking a spoon out of the center of the table without anyone else noticing, which then usually creates an avalanche of other people fighting over the remaining spoons. At some point no one really cared if you had the cards you needed to take the first spoon, since the whole fun of the game was wrestling with someone else over the last spoon, so we would evolve the game and change the rules to get to the fun part faster. It got to the point where we created a version of this game that didn't even involve playing cards at all. I can't remember what new mechanism we made up to trigger the first spoon, but it was something simple just to enable six eight-year-old girls, five spoons, and a fight to the death.

 

I used to play Barbies with the neighbor girl. But our Barbies didn't go out on dates with Ken. Our Barbies were telekinetic aliens on the run from the police. Like ET but with better hair.

 

i feel like this could be the premise of the next series of popular dystopian young adult novels.

 

My brothers and I played 'MacGuyver.' But only my older brother got to be MacGuyver and make things to save the day. My little brother and I had to be sidekicks or the villains.

 

We wanted to play spoons one time but we didn't have access to any (we were at a camp), so we played with markers. Not the best idea, especially when two people grab for the same one.


I'm sure we came up with games, but I can't really remember any. My brother and I played king of the mountain in the water on a small sail boat flipped upside down.

 

We used to play a game when my dad was about to wash the cars. The water would come down the driveway and spill into the street heading for a certain drain every time. Since we knew which path the water would take, we would create small towns out of pebbles, leaves, sticks, whatever else a tiny child could get their hands on along the route. Every so often there would be an anthill on the path, so that was a bonus. After the civil developments were completed, elaborate flood prevention were implemented: Levees of dirt, dams, etc. And then the water would come, and the infrastructure was tested. Some of them failed. Some didn't.

 

At lunch time back in primary school, I used to make the other kids follow me around and do what I do in a single file line, since my last name is Lodge-Bos, so technically I was the boss. It was all fun and games until they decided I wasn't their boss anymore.

 

What about games you played in the car? I had one called Mannequin. I would just stay completely still and pretend to be a mannequin, and occasionally other kids in other cars driving by would stare and point and actually believe I was one. Or maybe they thought I was dead. Either way I got their attention and it used to crack my sister up.

In high school we would get two cars driving next to each other on I-75 and we would toss a tennis ball back and forth between cars. I don't know why that was so amazing to us.


Because guns, armies and killing were awesome we used to get all our toy guns together and play a game we called Army. We would sneak around (tactically, of course) and engage in imaginary firefights, yelling I GOT YOU and if someone got you you had to pretend you were wounded. First to get hit were your legs. When one leg got hit, you had to hop on the other leg. If both got hit, you had to army crawl. If someone came up on you and gave you the kill shot, you were out of the game, but if you could crawl back to base, you would be healed.

Where is @TrakNar ? I feel like she would have made up the best games.

 

My neighbor down the block taught me about this hide the salami game when I was five. It seemed interesting at first. Later on it hurt to sit down.

 

That one, and robbing shops.

 

The Werewolf Game:

This game was played in the dark. One of us would be the werewolf, and would run out into the garden to hide. There would be a safe zone near the house, where it was light. The challenge was to enter the danger zone and return without being 'bitten' by the werewolf, which would turn you into one. It's basically that Cyberman game, but in the dark, and with more jump scares, now I think about. Also kind of flawed, as there was no objective to leaving the safe zone, and our cowardice meant it took several minutes to even pluck up the courage to leave.

 

I used to play this game called "Life" where I pretended I was funny and charming and everyone liked me and people would text me to hang out instead of me always being the person to ask people to hang out.

But the last time I played that was Tuesday, so I don't know if it counts.

 

For a while my sister, cousin and I used to play this game where we'd flop down motionless in a ditch and try to look dead whenever a car drove by. One day a guy stopped and asked if we were all right, and when we told him we were only pretending to be dead, he told us to stop doing that. So we did.

The end.

 

that reminds me of a time me and my friend were hiding by the side of a road and shooting passing cars with this gun that shot these little plastic discs. it was pretty harmless fun, just scattering some non-biodegradable useless hunks of plastic all over town. but then this car drove by, and we shot at it as usual, but the guy driving had his window rolled down and was unfortunately drinking a cup of coffee. perfect shot right to the side of the cup, guy freaks out spills his coffee all over his lap, and suddenly our little game seemed a lot less harmless. we did what sensible 9 year olds do, which is hide under the closest bridge. but this guy found us, and he had a huge dog. so we ran. first along side the river, then in the middle of the river with water up to our waists. it was quite harrowing, but i guess we ultimately escaped somehow because i'm here writing this.

the end.