School yard games

[Cal]

what did you play at break times.

i remember statues, top trumps and a game called queenio cokeio (spelling).

also seasonal games like conkers.

i guess the youth of today link up there PSP'S and knock the sh!te out of each other

[Oggy]

Top Trumps was great, though it seems like its made a come back kida now, they had sets of cars for everything, I even had super tankers how sad was that!

[foxy]

talking bout playground games,what about british bulldog,where there were loads of kids and u called one to run to the otherside of playground and if he made it the others ran,but if you caught him you were both on and had to call someone else until they made it across.
Also the old classic,piggy back fighting

[koukou]

No seems to have remembered kiss chase!!!!

What was that game called where you all stood against a wall and you had to dodge the tennis ball that was thrown at you???

Skipping was also a favourite. We tried to learn to do double dutch but nearly strangled ourselves in the process.

Hide and seek was a god one. Seeing as we had a lots of war shelter type buildings in our playground you could always be guaranteed a good hiding place.

There was one called What's The Time Mr Wolf. Where you had to try and get up to a kid at the other end of the playround when he had his back turned. If he saw you then you had to go back to the beginnning.

[Oggy]

Was the dodging game dogeball, we had our version of that standing against a wall and throwing the ball at someone. Another game was like tig, where you'd tug someone, they'd hold out their arms and someone would have to release them by running beneath their arms, not sure what it was called though. And Pileup, where someone just shouted Pileup! and everyone close enough would jump on top of the poor victim.

[koukou]

We also had stick in the mud. It was like tig but when you had been tigged you had to stand still with your legs open, and to be unfrozen someone had to crawl between your legs. Probably banned now!!!

[Lozza]

I remember playing LONDON, where one presron would spellit and the others would try to get as close as possible to them.(at least i think that's how it was played!) And, of course, being a female we played two-balls! My fave! singing songs whilst hitting balls against a wall....hopefully a boy wouldn't run in and nick a ball and go play footy with it with his mates!

[Lozza]

Does anyone remember playing the game with a penknife where you had to stick it in the ground and the other person had to stretch their legs to it? Can't belive we were allowed to take them into school!!!! How times have changed!!!

[steve edwards]

We Used To Play A Game Called 40 40 Block In , It Was Basically Hide And Seek But When You Found Another Person Who Was Hiding You Both Had To Run Back To A Pre Determined Place And Say 40 40 Block In And If The Caught Person Was Not Fast Enough They Were Out

[m-tina]

Does anyone remember playing the game with a penknife where you had to stick it in the ground and the other person had to stretch their legs to it? Can't belive we were allowed to take them into school!!!! How times have changed!!!

My dad actually taught us that game while camping! We weren't allowed to play it at school for some strange reason

[armchair_scouse]

At school, apart from 'British Bulldog 1-2-3', which got banned because people kept getting hurt, we played some of these games.

FOOTBALL
This was the mainstay of the school yard. Four different classes/years, playing four different football games in the same yard. Talk about chaos. Fantastic!!

MARBLES
We seemed to have an unusually high amount of drain covers/manholes in our school yard. Cue kids with bags full of marbles. Not just marbles mind, but ordinaries, coloureds, chinas, biggie chinas, squiggles, eggie chinas, etc., all in two sizes (small and large). Each different marble had a value relative to the next type, e.g. two ordinaries were worth one coloured, four coloureds were worth a china, etc. Each kid was competing with the next kid to win the other kid's prized marble(s), by knocking all of the marbles into the centre part of the drain cover/manhole cover.

FOOTBALL CARDS/UP AGAINST THE WALL
The 70s were the heyday for packs of football cards, bearing the picture of a player of the day and statistics about him on the back. Each pack would come with four or five cards and a piece of rock-hard chewing gum. We used to compete against each other by flicking these cards up against the school yard wall, the nearest winning the cards that were thrown. As well as football cards, there were some 'Dracula' cards for a while, and also some Star Wars cards. Those two decks of cards formed a picture on the reverse side of the cards if you got the whole deck.

LONGCHAIR
A silly game. Someone would get chosen and sit on one of the school benches. Then everyone else would chant 'Longchair, Longchair' as the next person sat on the first person, and one by one they would sit on the person before them in a long row. The game would end when the row fell over/became too long, or when the person at the bottom started turning blue/passed out. As I said, a silly game.

HE-BALL
You form a circle of players, legs touching together, and someone drops a tennis ball. Whomever's legs the ball rolled through was 'he'. Then the nominated person gave everyone else 30 seconds to run away in the school yard. After 30 seconds, the person who was 'he' picked up the tennis ball and ran after the others, I think having to bounce the tennis ball as he moved. When he got close to one of the other players, he could throw the tennis ball at them. If he hit them, then that person was 'he' too, and it went on until everyone was caught. The people running away were allowed to kick the ball away, or use their fists to deflect the ball if it was thrown at them.

[OrangeCremolaFoam]

hi guys..

Were we just 'sick' up here but Does anyone else remember playing a game of just random violence based on the Race Riots in Cities across the U.K. around 1978 until 1980? What would happen would be you would just be wandering around the Playground aimlessly and someone would shout either 'Brixton'!!! or 'Toxteth'!!! (not that we had a clue where these places were up here being about 10 but wed seen them on the news!) then everyone would start fighting and battering each other with schoolbags, stones, bits of bricks in fact anything that came to hand!!! Usually the Janny broke it up and I remember feeling utterly stupid trying to explain once to the Hedmaster that I was 'playing Brixton'...He was none to pleased and I got the ruler of the hand and a note home to my gran!! lol..happy days...funnily enough though no one played 'Broadwater Farm Estate' or 'Stonehenge'..lol..

all the best....

Rab ;0)

Fife
Scotland

[athenajm]

Re: School yard games

that's a crazy game, i went to an all girls school so the games were less...physical. one favourtie used to be elastcis where you have elastic in a circal and two people stood with it around their legs (it started off at ankles, then shins, then knees and then thighs) and you had to jump in and oput of it to a rhyme.
inside outside inside out
inside outside inside on

you had to get both feet in and the out then therte must have been anohter bit of the rhyme cause you had to jump so one leg was inside the elastci and one was outside.

the girls with the elastics round their legs would start off wiht their feet slightly apart and yo'd do the 4 levels. the levels got harder with the elastics moving up the legs and then once you'd done those four levels, the girls would move their feet close togtehr so the eleastic qas quite close together, then really far apart so it was harder to jump between 9then do the four heights), then one leg in so it was really skinny (I think the last one was called drianpipes i was rubbish at that set of levels).

all the mums used to get annoyed cause we'd nick all the elastic from their sewing boxes!!!!!

[sixtyten]

Re: School yard games

Was there a name for a game i used to see girls play in the 70's,that involved a tennis ball in a stocking banged against the wall in a certain pattern??

[stevef]

Re: School yard games

Anyone remember a game where got a line of people and you all took in turns throwing or rolling money up to a wall, and whoever was closest got to pick up all the coins and toss them in the air and guess heads or tails? Whatever they chose correctly they got to keep. Don't remember who got the rest of the coins. Had to play while no teachers were around though!