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Let’s play.

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Dip back into your childhood memories and answer this one.

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I remember neighborhood rounds of Spotlight.

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Though not with the “put up your hands or I’ll shoot” vibe Wiki is working here.

It was basically nighttime hide and seek with a flashlight and I doubt kids play it today.

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The world isn’t as innocent a place as when I was playing. Hiding in the bushes at night and being flushed out with lights is probably a good way to get shot today.

What (hopefully less dangerous) game did you play as a kid that’s faded into oblivion now ?

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64 thoughts on “Let’s play.”

      1. If you’re tagged, you’re frozen, as one might expect. If someone can go under your legs, you are free. If that person is tagged in the attempt, you are both out. Last one standing (Not tagged) is the chaser in the next round.
        If not that, marbles, anyone?

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  2. Hide and seek, no one plays that anymore. Kids now are on their phones or computers playing Fortnite, Call of Duty, or Roadblox. They don’t physically play, they virtually play and when the zombie apocalypse hits, GenXer’s will survive because we know how to read maps, drive stick shifts, cook over a campfire and drink water from the garden hose.

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  3. We would play laser tag at night on school properties and in parks.

    And once while driving cars.

    But the cops literally kept showing up.

    I guess gun-shaped objects in the hands of furtive figures running around in the dark frightened the local residents…

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  4. I’m not sure what outdoor games kids play today. Alas, there are no children in the family. For a while, we were big into croquet. Not quite sure how that happened in the small rural village I grew up in. Somehow my mother got us started, and our huge lawn was the perfect place to set it up.

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  5. Growing up in the mountains, I am sure there was danger but the only things we ever heard of back then were flying saucers and how they might abduct us. Oh, and Patty Hearst hid out in a farmhouse near us and my brother’s friend saw her at the bar and we all laughed at him until we found out it was true. Stories were like games back then. Just telling them and not relating the news as you know it today.

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  6. (I just re-read this comment and I see that some of these games are still played but I love this trip down memory lane too much to edit it.)
    That would be just about everything, I think. So many games involved various types of balls – stick ball, stoop ball, basketball of course, war, dodge ball, catcher/flyers/up, hit the stick and on and on.

    Then there were tag games – the basic hide and seek(tho I suspect kids still play that), ringolevio, statues, freeze tag, red rover, Simon Sez, poison.

    Miscellaneous games like skully, mumblety peg (played in the dirt with a pen knife – yes we all had pen knives), jacks, potsy of course, how could I forget that! Jump rope which included double dutch. We even jumped rope with only two people by tying one end of rope to a telephone pole. We used a piece of clothes line for the rope. Oh and tug-of-war when there was a big bunch of kids and whip.

    Hell, we were NEVER inside. I bet if I googled street games there would be even more I’ve forgotten. On hot Summer nights we wander the neighborhood in the early hours of the morning singing. Georgie Moschetto was always the ring leader on that – he would throw rocks against the screen of my bedroom window to wake me and then we would hit up a bunch of other kids and off we would wander.

    Oh and ‘House” – remember this was the 50’s – the older girls would wrangle the younger boys into playing.
    Ah, some of these games kids still play, I’m sure – certainly Double Dutch and some of the ball games. Nice trip down memory lane!

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      1. Aw, you could buy them at the candy store. No one mentioned yoyo’s. Had to be a Duncan and mine had a big ‘jewel’ on it…A lot of the games we played were particularly NYC – like skully – serious games of skully were played at the playground because the squares were painted on the concrete. And playgrounds and how we tormented the parkies LOL and then got banned. And riding our bikes where we weren’t supposed to go and sneaking into Belmont Racetrack and…and…

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  7. I was talking to a retired contractor about how the houses being built in a new development had virtually no backyard or front lawn: they were mostly concrete patios and driveways. He said kids no longer played outdoors anymore. The parents wouldn’t allow them to (“stranger danger” is still a thing here) and the kids had no interest, since it was more fun to be on a screen indoors. The yards didn’t even have room for a swimming pool, which used to be a god given right in California, partly because of water restrictions and partly because homeowners insurance premiums are already through the roof here and pools just add another extra expense.

    My grandkids, whose mother still kicks them out of the house during the summer, never heard of Red Rover. It requires a relatively large group of kids to play, and one thing I have noticed is neighborhood kids don’t hang out anymore. They might go to each other’s houses for play dates, but their activities are so restricted and planned, I wonder if they know what to do without a parent supervising them.

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      1. I wouldn’t say they don’t have any, but it’s different. My 13 year old grandson does software programming as a kind of puzzle solving. I have zero interest in it, but trying to figure out how to make a small robot spin in circles keeps him absorbed for a few hours. (Until he gets frustrated and starts screaming, “This sucks!”) My granddaughter loves drawing and painting, but lately it’s been just copying stuff from anime and manga. She is able to do freehand art, but her ability to draw Sailor Moon characters is what gets her attention and popularity at school. And I guess we all will do stuff for the benefits, though I’m hoping the money aspect doesn’t affect her for a long time.

        That said, a friend is leading a summer art camp for the local Parks and Recreation, and she’s appalled at how most of the kids just copy stuff from what they see on TV: My Pretty Pony, Dragon Ball Z, Thomas the Tank Engine, etc. She’s tried to give them assignments that force them to think of stuff on their own, but they get frustrated and say they’re bored. Friend says she won’t do this again next year, it’s too depressing.

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  9. Slip & Slide, Hide & Seek (I frequently hid by lying in the back widow infested ivy), riding bikes, running through sprinklers, dress up,… literally anything outdoors! There are currently 7 kids on my small block and all but 1 NEVER play, let alone outside. The remaining kid is 2 and his parents bring him out front to play all the time.

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      4. My dad wouldn’t let us get a Slip n’ Slide “because you’ll just break a leg.” Then one kid down the street got one, so we sneaked out in our swimsuits (worn under our clothes) and went to town on that sucker! But within 15 minutes some kid fell face forward and split his lip open. The Slip n’ Slide was rolled up and we never saw it again. 😦

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      5. I guess to our parents’ credit, we all still kept slipping & sliding long after my dental fail.

        We had a 1″ wide wooden fence at the end of the block that we’d walk along. I was the one who face-planted onto the asphalt side, despite having (then and now) great balance. I must have gone too fast or something.

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  12. Climbing trees, rising bikes (using our legs, not motors), roller hockey in the street, flying kites, fitting as many kids on the tire swing as possible and pushing it as high as possible, red rover (as others have said), kickball. Kids today are really missing out…

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  13. I will just say playing in the street until the street lights came on. Usually it was Kickball. But most children aren’t allowed to play outside while it gets dark especially without an Adult present.

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  15. We used to play “Gutte”. It is used by using tiny pebbles. Players sit down in a circle and one by one they pick up a pebble from the ground, throw it a little way up and pick up another pebble from the ground before catching the falling pebble as well–all with one hand!

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  19. Kick the can, freeze tag, and just stuff…once we tried to build an I Dream of Genie bottle with a stack of wood. It didn’t work so we gave up and made a pretend boat. I won’t say they don’t do these things today though. Just yesterday my grandkids, their dad and grandpa were playing spike ball and ladder ball. And whiffle ball has been a favorite for generations including this one.

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