Weird Games I Used To Play As A Kid (Part 1)

Let’s face it. Kids’ imaginations are incredible. They find ways to entertain themselves with nothing more than free time and whatever happens to be around them at the time. Give a kid a pencil and a piece of paper and you’ve just booked the next few hours of their time.

Back when my sister and our friends were just wee little tots, I daresay we were these types of kids. When we weren’t watching TV or playing video games during out daily allotted “hour of electronics,” we had to do something, so we came up with weird games. Looking back, they were a little bit of genius, and I don’t think I could have ever come up with them as the 20-something I am today. Here are some of the weird games that we played during our messed-up childhood.

The Mail Game

The Mail Game was a game I played with my sister, my best friend, and his brother. Essentially, the premise of this game was that my best friend and I would be seated on one side of a barricade, while my sister and my friend’s brother were on the other side.  The only communication between both sides of the barricade was through a plastic toy mailbox wedged into the middle of the barricade.

While sitting on opposite sides of the barricade, each group would engage in some sort of “work,” which consisted of drawing new Mario Party maps or drawing pictures of new room additions to an imaginary restaurant/casino/movie theater/one-stop-shop for everything that we dreamed of creating in the future. We drew pictures of kitchens, lobbies, theaters, dance floors, swimming pools, and other rooms we would have featured in our massive communities. Ours also had a science lab for “testing,” whatever that meant to a kid. My friend and I named our establishment “Dots,” to which my sister and my friend’s brother responded by creating “Squares.” Being the competitive children that we were, we then had to create “Super Dots,” followed by “Super Duper Dots,” and finally “Super Duper Pooper Dots.” I don’t know why we thought “Pooper” was something that anyone would want in a restaurant name, but maybe we were just innovators of our time.

The mailbox component of the game came into play when we decided to send messages to each other, or in some cases, tests. My friend’s brother had this thing called a “Big Box Test,” and a “Little Box Test,” and to this day I do not know what the difference between the two was. I think each test was simply some kind of picture or question that we would respond with another random picture or word, and he would fill in a progress bar on the top of the test, giving us a score as a response.  We mostly spent The Mail Game creating new Dot’s rooms and Mario Party maps, though.

One thing that this game foreshadowed was my tyrant-like tendencies, as I monopolized our only fan to keep cool and our only tent to do my work in. I don’t know why I felt that the tent was the best place to get work done during the hot, sweltering summer, but it was mine and I would not give it up no matter how much my best friend begged. That fan and tent somehow made me the boss of our side of the barricade, and I made him do all of his work outside of the tent in the heat.

The Shopping Cart Game

This game was slightly more violent than The Mail Game, but what’s a childhood game without some violence? This game had to be played with a large group of people, and we ended up playing it in my friends’ basement. The Shopping Cart Game was basically the classic game of tag, but instead of running around and touching someone to make them “it,” you had to push around a plastic shopping cart and ram into them. The catch was that this game also involved a ball, which, if thrown into the shopping cart, would make whoever was pushing the cart around freeze for a few seconds, allowing everyone else to reposition themselves from shopping cart doom.

I don’t remember who came up with this game, but at least it gave us a good bit of exercise. I don’t think anybody ever got hurt playing this, but I’m sure we all foster a mild fear of plastic shopping carts since this game’s origins. This wasn’t a game we played very often, but there is a special place in my heart for ramming my friends with plastic shopping carts.

The Lantern Game

Now, this game was played almost every time we had a big get-together at my house. Again, this is a remake of tag, but had to be played in a small, confined room. Or any room at all, I suppose, as long as it was in a room.

This game had to be played in complete darkness, barring one green plastic lantern to light the room. The person who was “it” was in charge of the lantern, and could do whatever they liked with it, though I think the common consensus was that it had to be on for the majority of the time. Also, the person who was “it” had to have their eyes closed the entire game, while everyone trying to not get touched by “it” was able to have their eyes open.  Naturally, this meant that, unlike a game of tag, there was very little running done during The Lantern Game. The closed eyes meant that whoever was “it” had to rely on their sense of sound (or smell, I suppose) to locate where other people were in the room to tag. Being the nice kids we were, we also decided that if the person who was “it” was headed towards a wall, we would warn them before any impact was made, which also gave them a sense of where everyone in the room might be.

When I said that whatever was done with the lantern was up to the person who was “it,” I mean anything went. Sometimes, we would put the lantern down in the middle of the room and just walk around, trying to find someone to tag, but many other times it was a lot more interesting. I recall holding the lantern up to my face and making funny faces while walking around the room, which probably made me look like a fool, but also made it incredibly hard not to laugh for my victims if I were headed straight towards them. There’s something about a completely dark room and a mad man walking directly towards you with the only light that makes kids want to crack up. I think once someone put the lantern down in the middle of the room and started jumping around the room screaming “Michael Jackson! Jackson Michael!” over and over again, which also warranted small bits of laughter. Jokes were told, and conversations were had between “it” and the others, but it was still pretty darn hard to find someone to tag. Occasionally, someone would hold the lantern in one hand and swing it violently around the room, trying to hit someone. We stopped this when it crashed into the wall and made a slight dent.

The Popsicle Stick Game

When I was a kid, I was pretty into arts and crafts projects, and as a result, my mother bought a large bag of colored popsicle sticks to make things with. Needless to say, I may have made one Jewish star (I don’t know why) and maybe one reindeer head out of the sticks before a fun and dangerous game was invented.

The Popsicle Stick Game was your basic attack game. What I mean by this is that we probably had over 750 popsicle sticks, so we divided them equally between two teams (one consisting of my friend and I, while the other consisted of my sister and my friend’s brother). After splitting up the popsicle sticks, we made a line through the center of the room we were playing in, and declared that neither team would be able to cross the line onto the other team’s side. After doing this, we were given a few minutes to make a complete mess of our respective sides of the room, creating barricades and protection forts for the battle to come.

After both sides were set up, all hell broke loose. With about 375 popsicle sticks per side, we would immediately start chucking them as hard as we could at each other. There was no winner or loser of this game, though I suppose the winners just ended up being whoever got the least hurt throughout the attacks. If you don’t think popsicle sticks hurt, try bunching a few of them together in a handful and throwing them as hard as you can at another kid. That shit hurts. It’s amazing we didn’t put out any eyes, but at least we weren’t too crazy and we didn’t create something called The Sharp And Pointy Rock Game.