what fun things did you play as kids

[bikeman564™]

@Further's marble post made me think. One fun game a friend I played in my basement was mini hockey. We'd play w/ a nerf ball and those tiny souvenir hockey sticks that you could by at Joe Louis Arena at Redwing games Great fun.

similar to this

[Parsnip Totin Jack ★]

Doctor with the girl next door 

[ChrisL]

We grew up just a few miles from the beach and were surfing pretty young, elementary school age for sure.  We also had a vacated farm across the street from my house “the field” that served as our playground. BMX tracks, Rock fights, BB gun wars, good fun.  It’s development into condos coincided with the end of my childhood.

My brother and I really didn’t play much inside. Board games, cards etc wasn’t our thing.  My mom probably wanted us out of her hair so pushed us outside and we were happy to oblige.

[TrentonMakes]

Outside pastimes included riding our bikes*, shooting baskets, and BB guns... cross-country skiing when we were a little older.

Inside was mostly Legos, and jigsaw puzzles.  Still love both.

 

*Those days of just aimlessly riding our bikes, around our property or not too far away, were sweet.  No way to count how many hundreds (thousands?) of hours we spent that way.

[Longjohn ★]

13 minutes ago, Old#7 said:

Doctor with the girl next door 

^ this

[jsharr ★]

Football was the king in Texas and Oklahoma.  Indoors, the biggest thing we played was probably GI Joe.

[petitepedal ★]

Space explorers, built a camp, ....our hockey was the table top game...and my favorite board game was mousetrap. 

[Kzoo]

Outside - in the woods, building forts and tree houses, playing war, riding bikes, bb guns, sports - hoops, baseball, football. wiffle ball.

Inside - model cars and NASA rockets, I had a great 1/32 scale slot car track, chemistry set. 

[bikeman564™]

BMX bikes where big in the 80s (I had a mongoose california ), then followed by freestyle.  I had friends who rode Haro, GT, Predator, Redline etc. We rode everywhere and spent a ton of time outside. BB guns were shot too.  Played a lot of street hockey...CAR.  Very similar to @ChrisL there was  a tiny forest across the street where we played a lot, and then it got cut down to more of a field where we rode our bikes which had jumps. Then it eventually became an apartment complex but also at the end of my childhood. We had some kick ass times back then.

 

[TrentonMakes]

6 minutes ago, petitepedal said:

Space explorers, built a camp, ....our hockey was the table top game...and my favorite board game was mousetrap. 

I think we played the actual game once, and after that we just built the trap and set it off a few times.  It maybe worked half the time. 

well, I guess I'm also one of those young punks who was playing Atari video games from about the age of 10..... spent a lot of hours that way too.  

[maddmaxx ★]

Wiffle ball.  Shooting each other with BB guns and blowing stuff up.

[Longjohn ★]

I lived by a crick and we would catch salamanders, crawfish, snakes, and frogs. The neighbor girl wasn’t any fun to try to scare, she caught more than we did. I often wondered what would have happened to our relationship if her parents hadn’t moved to Florida? We only had three neighbors and she was the only kid close to my age. We were inseparable.

[Kirby]

I was a city kid so we'd sometimes go to the park (the "Oval") and play hide and seek in the trees, or go on the swings and monkey bars.  The boys played a lot of basketball and stoop ball or stickball was also popular.   At school, Red Rover was popular during the lunch break, or"Mother May I" for the younger kids.  Tag and "Statue" were also popular during lunch breaks.

And of course when we wanted to stay home and watch tv, there was the 4:30 ABC Movie and sometimes the  ABC Afterschool Specials (which aired after Match Game on CBS).

[petitepedal ★]

3 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

80s

Ha ha ha. He said 80's...sorry Bikeman....by the 80's I was working.

[bikeman564™]

3 hours ago, maddmaxx said:

Wiffle ball. 

that was fun

[MickinMD ★]

Somewhere, buried in my basement, is a Baltimore Clippers ice hockey stick I won as a door prize at a Clippers game in the late 60's.

The Clippers were a minor league team that outdrew the Baltimore Bullets (now Washington Wizards) NBA team in the same arena.  But the league disbanded after some of it's major teams joined the an NHL-competitor league that lasted a while then merged with the NHL.  The Clippers did not do so and soon were extinct.

[MickinMD ★]

Most of the games I played as a kid were low-cost, typical stuff. Most families buying their own homes in my suburb were blue collar workers who didn't have much money but were responsible types buying their own homes, so there wasn't much for extras in the 50's and 60's:

Outdoors games. Back then, we spent most of our time outdoors:

1. Spartans against the Persians and Americans against the Nazis.   We -several boys- would get trash can lids and sticks and pretend we were fighting imaginary Persians.  We did flanking maneuvers and imitated some stuff we had learned in school in ancient history like Hannibal's double-envelopment of the Roman Army at Cannae.  Most of our father's were in WW2 and Army-Navy Surpus stores were a big thing. So we all had belts, canteens, and various other stuff.  So we did the same movements against the German Army we did against the Persians.  Two of us, brothers, ended up going to the U.S. Naval Academy and one, Tim Supko, became an Admiral.

2. Target Practice.  Several of us - or our fathers - owned 22-caliber rifles.  We - around 12 years-old - walked with the encased rifles a mile to Sears (recently having changed its name from Sears & Roebuck), bought 50-packs of 22 short shells - no one batted an eye at 12 year-olds walking into Sears with guns and buying ammunition, and then walked to an abandoned chalk quarry and did target practice.

3. Crawfish Fights.  This is probably the weirdest one.  We would catch crawfish at a local pond, take them home, keep them in a bucket, and then put them in small tub and watch them fight until one tried to get away from the other.  I don't remember betting anything: the kid with the overall winner just got bragging rights.

4. Swinging on ropes.  There were two places where someone had attached 20-30 feet-long ropes to poles or trees.  One swung out over an alley below.  One swung over a stream.  Usually a dozen or more kids were hanging around each one and spending hours hanging around for our turns.

5. Baseball - in addition to little league - and Football.  We were Baby Boomers born within several years of WW2 and our block could supply enough kids to make a couple of teams.  If we didn't have enough for two complete baseball teams, we played where anything hit to the left of 2nd base was a foul ball.  We used to get a few really cheap, sawdust-filled balls and play with them until the broke.

6. Swimming.  Almost all kids in Maryland can swim. When I was a kid, the county provided bus transportation and 10 days of swimming lessons for $10. There were/are so many beaches, pools, etc. They were cheap enough when we were kids that our parents would take us there every weekend or two in the summers.

Indoors:

1. Winter Swimming. The Knights of Columbus hall in Baltimore had a huge pool with an excellent diving board in the basement where members' kids could swim for 50 cents on Saturdays. A friend's father belonged, so he'd show his dad's membership card, pay his 50 cents, walk past the counter, pitch the card back to the next friend in line, and he'd show that same card, pay 50 cents, etc.  Looking back, the man taking the money HAD to know it was the same card used by several kids in a row but never said anything - I guess he wanted to let us all swim!  It cost 25 cents for each of the two bus rides.  So I'd get $1 to pay for it all, though I had to walk I mile from my surburban home to the bus stop and the same back home.

2. Miss Anne's Dance Club.  On most weekends, Mrs. Anne Dworkowski, who son Dennis was part of our street's Baby Boomer group, let us early-teens come to her house and have a dance party in her big basement where we turned on the TV and watched "The Buddy Dean Show" - a local version of Dick Clark's American Bandstand.  That's where we all learned the twist, mashed-potato, etc. while copying the dancers on TV.  Miss Anne was a fantastic cook and we always got lemonade or other drink and cookies. 

2. Board games: Monopoly, Parcheesi, etc.

3. Jigsaw Puzzles

[team scooter]

Between my friends and I, we had enough Hot Wheels cars and track to make an entire city. We rode the tires off our 20 inch bikes. We fished in the summer, ice skated in the winter.

[TrentonMakes]

52 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

3. Jigsaw Puzzles

The last puzzle I had done was when I was recovering from my surgery in 2016.... but I got one for this past Christmas.  The better gift was not the puzzle itself, but the implication that I could spend the time to put it together.  Which I did - all finished except there's a piece missing and I will probably never know if it was shipped that way or if it was brushed onto the floor and vacuumed up or something.  The frustration I feel almost cancels out the relaxation I enjoyed.....

[Further]

All the usual sports, pickup football was big, pickup hockey in parking lots or on frozen ponds, always on a bicycle for fun and transportation.

Spent a lot of time in the woods.

I remember a lot of swinging on ropes. We made a rope swing that became a little too popular, somebody fell and broke an arm, a concerned parent cut the rope, we replaced the rope, another kid fell and broke something, collarbone maybe, the concerned parent cut the tree down.

About the only indoor fun I remember was playing Dr. with the little next door.

 

PS:  And building shit. Huts, clubhouses, forts, ( I haven't a clue the difference between these, they were all shacks )

And go karts & trail bikes. 

[Square Wheels]

Lawn darts

[Ralphie ★]

Mainly baseball, which been beri beri good...  to me!  Also the 20" bikes - Joey Shitwood was a big influence, so we loved to jump old bikes on a ramp.  My younger brother was the real terror - I was more conservative, although I was the one who busted my head open by wiping oot on a dirt/gravel hill.  Go-karts were big - first a 4 cycle recreational one, then a 2 cycle racing one.  The 4 cycle was governed, so my brother and I fingered oot that if you turned around you could manually push the throttle for a little extra boost.   Hmm, maybe the shock from the spark plug while doing that and the head injury from wiping oot 'splain some things.   Woods and building forts were also a big part of life. When I was aboot six or so, I conned my 60-ish non-driving grandmother with a pin in her hip who was watching me into walking to the hardware store with me to buy building supplies for said fort.

Inside, my buddy and I looooved Risk!  We would play it for hours while he watched the front desk of his parents' motel.

 

 

 

[BuffJim]

We had some crazy games we played with our church boys club. 

Turn on the Lights. The gym had two doors each with their own set of light switches. You’d have about 25 kids on each team. Job was to turn on the other teams lights before they turned on yours. Much more violent than it sounds. 

We played basketball with the only rules being no biting, hair pulling or eye gouging. 20 or so kids a side. Basically tackle basketball. No need to dribble. 

Duck duck goose with a rolled up newspaper. With 12-15 year olds it was pretty violent. 

And many more frisbee and dodgeball variations that were free for alls. 

[Further]

15 minutes ago, BuffJim said:

free for alls. 

Ooh   free for all, king of the hill, wrestling  these played a large part in my childhood entertainment  Huge part... 

[BR46]

Riding bikes,  bb guns, riding horses, snowmobiling, I was 8 when dad came home with a Honda 50 for us kids to ride.

I've been hooked ever since. 

[Wilbur ★]

We whittled arrows out of cedar shakes to shoot at each other.  The propellant was a slingshot.  More fun than paintball!