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.
