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Games Kids Played Back When
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We just spent 38 hours without power. Not so bad, you say? I have a brand new release and couldn't publicize it. Yes, the publisher does more than most, but these days, if you don't promote, you don't sell.
Ahem. This will be a
short post since I had so little time to get going on it, because, well, we had
no power. So here's my new release to the right. Kudos to Livia Reasoner who designed the cover. It's a fun western romance with attack goats and a killer chicken named Jethro.
About that power outage... Three adults and four boys live in this house. The four boys were utterly lost—no Xbox, no
Kindle, no computer. So no video games. They had no idea
how to entertain themselves but quickly devised a game where they played
characters of their favorite video games.
Before that happened, though, they wanted to know what we did when we
were kids.
No one made up our worlds for us. Yes, sometimes we played in Marshal Dillon’s
world, or Paladin’s world, or Samantha Stevens’ world, but mostly we made up
our own. Someone would be the hero,
someone the villain, and then there was the damsel in distress. We all hated being the damsel so usually the
smallest kid (boy or girl) got stuck with that.
And we played all sorts of games:
- Tag (various versions)
- Mother May I
- Duck, Duck, Goose
- All Bears Are Out Tonight
- Anti-Anti-I-Over
- Red Rover
- Dodge ball
- Red Light, Green Light
- Fox and Geese
- King of Bunker Hill (on a 20-tier haystack)
- Swing the Statue
- Double Dutch jump rope
- Hop Scotch
We rode our horses everywhere, and when not horseback, we played with marbles, jacks, tops, and hula hoops. Could you ever get going with the paddle that
had the string and ball attached? My dad
was pretty good but I never did get the hang of it. The lucky kids had Lincoln Logs (made of
actual wood) and Tinkertoys.
On hot summer days, we made cucumber boats and raced them in
the stock tank. We caught frogs and
horny toads, and we looked for gold. We
hunted pheasant and duck. Not quail,
though—Mom wouldn’t have it. During the
winter, we read books, whittled, and gathered fodder for more fun games in the
summer.
I have to say, I feel sorry that our four boys have no
interest in any of the above—they do love their video games.
