Friday, June 22, 2012

Childhood games: Kelli's perspective


Growing up on a sparsely populated street (Federal Street) left my brothers and me with nobody to play with except each other. We had the three of us on the weekdays and on weekends and summer vacation we also had our stepbrother and stepsister. We did play the typical game of whiffle ball or kick ball on occasion, but we tended to prefer games we made up.
Color ball was a favorite. We would designate one person as the “thrower upper” and one as the “color giver”. The color giver would assign each of the players a color. The thrower upper would yell a color as he or she threw the ball up. If your color was chosen you would have to catch the ball and hit someone with it. That person then became the thrower upper and the previous thrower upper becomes the color giver. I recently played this game with my boyfriend’s sons and it is still as fun as when I was ten.
Another game we loved was called Monster. When I look back at the game, I realize the game wasn’t all that fun for Matt. Monster was a violent version of hide-and-go-seek. Matt was always the “monster” because he was the oldest and the strongest. The rest of us would go hide and Matt would come and find us. If you were found, Matt would drag you to a hiding spot of his choosing. When I say drag, I mean drag. He would then leave you there until someone found you and saved you. The game went smoothly until Matt had captured all of us and deposited us in different hiding spots and nobody knew. We never bothered to work out the kinks in that.
On cold or rainy days we had board games to keep us busy. Not your typical board games for seven through ten year olds. We had Risk, which is a game for adults about global domination. Not exactly Candy Land. We also played a French card game called Mille Bourne. It was actually one of our favorites even though we did not understand the French writing on the cards. We were also probably the youngest kids in our hometown to know how to play chess and backgammon.  
Playing normal kid games just wasn’t for us.