I think we are going to have to have a video of Snoper Bopper.

AMDG,
Janet

My brother and I played “Tiiiiimmmmbbbbeeeeeer!” which is the same as “Mummytombs”, but we were trees and had to stay stiff while falling, because, you know, trees wouldn’t bend. My children have yet to discover this game…but the do play the classic - “the floor is lava anad if you touch it you die and are out”.

You call it Murderball.  Growing up in NYC, we called it Kill the Guy with the Ball, here in Philadelphia, they call it Hail Mary.  I kid you not. 
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Steaming hot pit of lava.  You have to go all around the room walking only on the furniture, because the floor (obviously) is a steaming hot pit of lava.  It takes some leaping and eventually someone will fall in.  My kids play it in the living room.  They’re not allowed on the TV.
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Catching rolled up paper towels in your mouth.  Alright, we all play this one, including my husband and me, but my seven year old is so much better at it than the rest of us.  I think he has the biggest mouth. 
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But mostly, in this heat, my kids have been enjoying the dance and zumba games on the XBox.  It’s hot out there.

Here’s the brilliant invention of my friend Eve: “Dead Lions.”
1. Kids pretend to be lions that are dead.
2. If grown up sees child move, they’re out.
Result?
Minutes and minutes of quiet on the homefront savannah!

Five minutes ago, while I was holding both babies, the older boys (4 and 2 years old) ran past wearing old hats, mitts, and no pants, and wrestling a piece of particleboard, which they were going to try to use as a sled down the stairs. They were done making a Minecraft oven at the back of their closet (out of boxes)and baking themselves, and needed further entertainment.

I took the sled away from them.

I’m not going to ask where the two-year-old got all the scrapes on his face. He looks abused. Yesterday i went upstairs to find out why he was crying, and my four-year-old, when pressed, said they were playing a game. What game? “Dragging my brother around by his leg”.

I used to think critically about other people’s parenting.

“Dead Horse” has been a family favorite for all 17 years of our parenthood. My husband developed the game which involves the adult (or older child who is babysitting) yelling “Dead Horse!”, everyone dropping to the ground in various Dead Horse poses, and the first one to move or make sounds loses. If played with a children older than 3, it gives the person in charge at least 10 minutes of quiet time. Genius! My brother has now implemented it with his 15month old and she can already yell “De’ Horth!”.

How about “lava bridge” where everyone has to make it across the swingset without touching the ground, at top speed, all in a frantic line of flailing limbs and heads, and sometimes a random stick that someone just HAD to bring along.  This all began the year we put some red mulch, aka lava, underneath the swingset because we were hoping to make the death-defying feats going on out there a little less deathly.  Sometimes, to spice it up, some of the kids are actually ON the swings while this is going on.  I try not to watch.  I confess to being relieved that the game fell out of favor a bit just before our extremely accident prone 5yo (3 concussions in 4 years, plus two injuries requiring staples/stitches—he’s a walking disaster) became physically capable of playing.

I forgot about “Mush, Doggie!”  This is one of their favorites.  One boy sits on the blanket holding a light saber.  Another boy drags his brother who’s sitting on the blanket and trying to whack the puller’s legs while yelling, “Mush, Doggie!”  The one doing the pulling weaves and dodges the light saber while simultaneously trying to get the boy on the blanket to fall off.  When he falls off, it’s the other guy’s turn to ride with the stick.

When my sisters and I were younger there was a little stand of tree in the yard that roughly formed a rectangle. We used to take blankets and sheets and tie them up to make a “fort”. It had three stories until the top story ripped, then there was a fun game of jumping through the top story onto the second story…until that one ripped. Then there was the fun game of trying to convince someone to jump through the top TWO stories to the first one.

Mom always wondered why all her sheets had holes in them.

This was in addition to the other trash we used to “build” forts in trees (cardboard boxes, old chairs, rope, bungees). Then there was also the game of us being trapped in a tower and needing to make a rope out of sheets to get out of the second story bedroom window. Or the wonderful game of climbing out onto the roof. Be glad you don’t have climbers!

“In the Chicken Pen”
It wasn’t actually a game with a name. We had a large, moveable wire pen used for baby chicks, ducklings and/or bunnies.It was big enough for small children, too.They could sit in there on the grass & play with the critters for hours.

My brother, two cousins, and I used to play “gremlins”.  It involved carefully sneaking up to the closet door in the attic of my Grandma’s house, opening the creaky door, yelling “Gremliiiiiiiiiins!”, and then running and screaming and jumping on the bed in the adjacent room

What about Cowboy Fort? Blankets all around the kitchen table, anchored by wooden blocks, then half are cowboys in the fort and half are Indians outside. Yell, war whoop, and scream when shot. Trade sides after a victory dance. Fun and historical too! Practically like summer school.

Truly your magnum opus! Take a bow!

My husband and I like to play tennis, but we had difficulty keeping all the kids off the court, so we turned it into a game called “moving target” in which, we have a big bag of balls, and the kids have to try to collect them all from the court without getting hit by whichever ball is in play. For some reason, they love it.

This sounds exactly like my childhood. Exactly. Especially the rickety-board, rusty nail bit. Trade that for rusty tractor bucket attachment and add a little cow manure and some baling twine, and you have one rockin’ good summer distraction.

Not sure what they play on weekdays; my wife assures me it’s all very safe and wholesome. On weekends, the games usually involve a lot of running and chasing and roaring and arguing (“No, you’re a bear and I’m a lion! Dad, who would win in a fight between a bear and a lion? Wait, no, pretend I’m a cobra instead!”) On weeknights, bedtime stories are prefaced with either Rough House or The Hiding Game. Rough House basically involves me acting like a scary monster, and trying to teach them pack fighting tactics until they are all standing on my back, victorious. The Hiding Game happens when Dad leaves the room for a minute and admonishes them to be there when he gets back. When he returns, they are hiding under the covers, and Dad then proceeds to search high and low for them, and shout out the window that they’d better come inside or, so help him, he will make them spend the night with the chickens in the backyard. It usually ends when the shrieking and giggling reach such a pitch that Dad gets suspicious of the blankets and gives them a tickle.

Years ago one of our sons came in crying.  When my husband asked what was wrong he said, “We were playing THAT GAME where you run around in circles with your eyes closed, and I ran into a tree.”

A year or two ago my youngest discovered that the outside of his sleeping bag is very slippery. He would climb in and slide down the stairs (well, until I caught him doing it headfirst and had to make him stop). I’ve also found him playing the lava game in his bedroom.

My 6 and 4 year old boys play Whapping Pool- which is, of course, that game where one boy stands in a doorway yelling, “Here comes Whapping Pool!” and flailing his arms, and the other boy must dive in and out of the room without getting whapped.  But he always gets whapped.

Perfect.  My kids always tie each other up.  Lol.

Though the power of technology we play Stink Bomb.  A kid takes my iPod, set the timer and hides it somewhere and we have to find it before the timer runs out, if not, we all have to explode.

“Wee Belly!”  or, possibly, “WHEEEEEE!!! Belly”

Stick your chest waaaay out,  then run into the similarly puffed out chest of sibling, yelling “W(H)EE BELLY!”.
Bonus points: finding a pregnant lady who will play the game with you.

We’d always play the classic hide-and-go seek. My older brother, forced to play, aka babysit us while Mom talked on the phone, would always instantly find my little brother and I by slowly and creepily calling out, “Pooooopsy butt ... Pooooooopsy butt.” Which of course made us laugh and make it his turn to hide. And we could never, ever find him. We later, as adults, found out that he’d climb into the rafters/loft of an abandoned barn on our property where he had piles of comic books and filched grape pop. Jerk.

Boogieman: One person hides in a completely dark house and everyone tries as hard as they can not to find him because he scares them when they do.

My brother would dress all in black with a ski mask to play this game and would change locations which made it even more terrifying.

Oh, these made me laugh!  We played all sorts of things as kids:
1. the lava pit in the living room
2. building elaborate forts in the back yard
3. Cowboys and Indians
4. Tornado (where you hold your arms straight out from your sides and spin until you fall down.  I can no longer see the appeal in this! :P )
5. Lions (we would actually scratch each other and roar)
6. chasing each other with wooden swords (or if we couldn’t find one, just sticks) while riding bikes
7. climbing up the trees as high as we could and then daring each other to jump all the way to the ground (and I wonder why my knees are already acting up!)
8. climbing to the top of the Rock Pile (pulled out from the mines in the early 1900’s) and playing Avalanche, where we throw rocks down the side in quick succession, trying to start a mini-avalanche.  I got brained once with one about the size of my head, and I don’t think we ever played again!
*sigh*  Good times. :)

We have a three year old middle child who has no volume control whatsoever.  He is very exhausting to go on car rides with because he cheerfully yells every thought that comes into his head.  So we recently decided to try that parental favourite “The Quiet Game”.  Daddy said “ok.  one, two, three, GO”.  30 seconds of blissful silence followed.  Then: “LET’S PLAY THE LOUD GAME!!!”

My nephew has always liked to make things out of bits and pieces.  He’d regularly rifle the recycling for supplies for monsters, robots, etc.  When asked one day whether he wanted to go along on a trip to the dump, he pondered for a minute and then asked, “Dropping off or picking up?”

One of my delicate little daughter’s favorites is regicide. It’s easy! Take the nerf sword. Carry it to Daddy. Daddy is the King. Daddy knights daughter (or dames her). Daughter grabs sword and yells “I slay you” while stabbing the King. Other perennial favorites include wrestling, including sweet moves like the pile driver and the body slam and Circus, wherein she jumps off the arm of the sofa into a perfect somersault. At least, it’s usually perfect.I should point out she also plays with her baby dolls and is continually dressed as a princess and asks people to marry her, so I figure it’ll all come out even.

I am number 4 of 10 kids so yeah, we did some unusual things. Some classics include:

“Shepherd Rides the Sheep”...until my 8 yr old sister used my 3 yr old brother for the sheep, and it ended with stitches in his chin.

“Who Can Jump Off the Highest Step”...you got it, keep working your way up the stair case, see who dares to jump off the highest height. Ended with stitches in my lip.

“Chips Patrol” A large wooden rocker in our living had surprisingly sturdy arms that made for excellent motorcyles. Add a kid on either side, siren noises and uncontrollable rocking and boom! Stitches in my brother’s forehead. (Same brother who was the sheep…)

I am sure there were many more weird games we played…and many more trips to get stitches. But we had fun, at least we used our imaginations!

We played ‘hotdog in the middle’. This is where all the kids try to get to mom at once, so the one hugging mom’s front is the hotdog, and the two who get onto her back and onto the one in the front of mom, are the two buns. If more kids pile on, then if they are on the outside they become the buns, and the previous buns become the, mustard, relish, etc. Through all this we sang at the top of our lungs: ” hot dog in the middle, hotdog in the middle; two buns, ketchup, mustard, etc, hotdog, hotdog, hotdog in the middle,” all the while rocking the entire pile of human beings back and forth.  It was a lot of fun.  The youngest always managed to worm her way into the middle to be the hotdog and to be the closest to mom!

During my last pregnancy I invented Carnivorous Plant. Kids run past, screaming, adult tries to eat them while not moving from her chair. It’s a good game. Especially the part where you don’t have to get up.

Didn’t anyone else play spinner—go out on the swing, twist it as tightly as possible with someone in it and let it go?  It twists in opposite directions long enough to make the poor victim really dizzy when he gets free and staggars off.  If you have a REALLY long rope to the swing (say from a limb 20 feet or so in the air) you can get interesting gastronomic side effects…..

my kids have all loved going down the stairs in sleeping bags.We have an old house and a very steep stairwell and they strip all their bedding and throw it down the bottom of the stairs and i leave to another room cause it makes me too nervous to watch. I have 7 kids and that is probably the favourite game. Hide and go seek in our scary 130 yr old basement is a huge thrill and always ends in tears as do most games. They also love going down our hill in trashcans, i guess they have no fear and i hope this all leads to good memories, although i said it usually ends in tears and arguements. Oh well.

First, I’m too awfully proud of myself for getting the smarty pants Pieper reference. 
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Secondly, I have similar parenting style.  We began attending a new church recently and they asked for my help in organizing some kind of fair/festival thing.  They assumed my status as a mother would qualify me as an expert at entertaining children.  I’m bringing your list to the committee meeting.

Oh and when I was a kid we played something called “salugi” which I think other people call “keep away.”  You steal someone’s something (book, ball, whatever) and throw it over and around that someone to the other players while yelling, “Salugi!”

We went down the stairs in sleeping bags, piled pillows at the bottom of the stairs and dared each other to jump off higher and higher steps, we used upside down stools as boats, opened all the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen and tried to get through the obstacle course, played timbeeeerrr on our parents water bed. One of the middle sisters would be the ‘mad dog’ and would chase us around the house growling and biting and we would run and scream and climb up a bunkbed for saftey. We played the Dying Game where the leader tells everyone how to die (poisoned ice cream, bullets, the ususal) and we would act it out and the leader would choose a winner based on how well they died and stayed dead.

My kid (he’s my only) plays ‘normal people’ with the neighbors.  I kid you not.  It’s their version of house with police, drug sniffing dogs and PhD students sprinkled in.

Thanks to all!  My 10-yo and I have read the whole list together and laughed a lot.
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Mine play dodge pillow and “pool”—the latter being a pile of all the cushions pillows and blankets to be had, on the floor, then jumped into and “swimming” around in.  My 10yo just told me about “300 spartans” which apparently involves hacking at each other with pillows until one is mortally wounded, that kid yells “For Sparta!” and falls down dead.
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But in my opinion the main game played around here is “play fight” which always ends in earnest punching and kicking and crying.  Whadya want, I got four boys.

Love it! We used to play some fun games when I was a kid. Definitely the lava game, and fort-building. We also played “American Gladiator” (complete with names like Siren and Nitro) where we made an obstacle course out of couch cushions and other things, and then had to see how fast we could run it. My parents used to play “Monsters” with us, where they would turn off all the lights and chase us around the house in the dark. But then one time my brother went outside and didn’t realize he stepped in dog poop and tracked it all over the carpet. That was the last time we played that game :)

AHH!  I rather want to post this on my wall at home.  “Here kids. Instructions.”

As children, we discovered that the plastic-coated crib mattress made the best “sled” for the stairs.  Sleeping bags are good too, but the mattress is faster, if you can get it out from under the sleeping baby.

We also loved “get as close as possible to tipping over the swing set without actually doing it” (cuz if it tipped over we’d have to get dad to fix it)

@Kyra- I’m going to adopt Carnivorous Plant!

I didn’t read quite all the posts, but something I noticed in common of those which I did read - kids playing like kids should, not planted in front of a video game or computer game, gazing at the screen until their eyeballs are burned out. Hurray to you all for encouraging real play and real interaction in your kids!!

My kids used to play “don’t touch the ground,” which apparently was an outdoor version of the lava game. They climbed trees out in the woods near our house and tried to see how far away from home they could go, leaping from tree to tree.

My middle sister used to take the cushions off the couch, have our youngest sister lay on one, cover her with a green blanket and red and yellow pillows and another cushion, and say she had to Squish the Sandwich while jumping or falling on her. She also (when younger) would crawl around the house pretending to be a vacuum cleaner. Grandma bought her a sweeper vac and she had a blast.

By the time I was 10 or 11, my sisters favorite game to play with me was Helicopter, where I would take hold of both their hands and spin them around until their feet left the ground. They thought it was great. Not all adults agreed.

We all played endless games of house, often influenced by whatever book I was reading at the time. Sometimes Mom or Grandma would let us raid their closets and jewelry boxes so we could dress up properly. The best thing, though, was raiding the box of small rocks and shells or the button box for doll food and money.

We had Shark- the person on the floor must kill anyone who steps off the furniture

Lego guns was also a favorite, shooting little pieces of lego at each other with elastic bands.

Crack the egg -  one person folds up holding their legs in with their arms while on the trampoline and then 4-8 more people jump until the “egg” either is lets go of their legs ( therefore cracked ) or is bounced off the trampoline.

Wow, so much to look forward to!  My kids are under 4 and only play Doctor where everyone dies and the doctor “fixes” them.

We had the “airfing board” - hours of fun with the kids sliding off the couch seated on a large piece of styrofoam.  I should have marketed it.

Now we just have “bicker at each other until Mother locks us outside.”  I always win.

I had to take a 30 second break from reading when I got to the words “No fair!” My laughter just wouldn’t let me continue.

God bless you now and forever!  A blessing on your house!  May God have mercy on your spouse.

A good one for the beach:
Put the Eye In the Pig!
draw a pig in the sand with a stick then one child goes in the middle of the pig with stick.  close eyes, someone twirls them round and round and round and then marches them up, down, left, right.  let them go and shout very loudly “Put the Eye In the Pig!”  then they have to try and find the pig with their eyes shut and jab the stick in the sand where they think the pigs eye is.
Basically pin the tail on the donkey.

We had dizzy wars and the “Ouchy board”

Dizzy wars two people spin around in circles arms and fist outs. First person to give up looses. Added challenge eyes closed.

The “Ouchy board” Long kitchen table bench, legs up on a swing. Swinging see-saw and the first person to fall off wins because the ouchy board ouches the other participant. Goal of the game to fall off at the same time.

Two mattresses against a couch makes a great waterless underwater diving head first game. Hazards your brother may or may not break his nose. Caution do not tell parents about blood until after you have cleaned most of it up.

I still remember hanging all my little brother’s clothes on a fence to dry because we were not allowed back in the house wet. Luckily for us it was a sunny day and we dissected ants with rocks until the clothes were dry.

Anyone else ever do reverse hide and seek?  One kid hides and everyone else seeks.  As they all find the hider they squish into the hiding place together.  Fun!

This article and all the great comments cracked me up so much!  Our favorite game when we were younger was no-touch-ground-tag, a professional sport involving daring leaps across playground equipment and hawk-like monitoring to make sure nobody broke the two-steps rule. 

The “cushioning” at the playground was a layer of pebbles (none of this fancy rubber mat stuff).  We used to carry up loads of pebbles in the front of our shirts and dump them down the slide while an unfortunate victim acted as the “stopper” at the bottom.  When we had filled up the slide with a half-ton of gravel, the kid at the bottom would jump out and release the avalanche.  That game was popular with our mothers, as it made sure they kept their jobs in the laundry business.

OK - I observed two of my children playing this at the tender ages of four and five.  The four year old said to her sister, “Let’s play Jesus!!” (I patted myself on the back for doing such a wonderful job at instilling the faith in them…).  “Lily, you stand here.”  Emily then proceeded to lift Lily’s arms up and push them against the wall.  She hammered on each hand with a block.  “Ok, now die.” 
I didn’t know what to say.
Relax, they are both normal, loving adult parents as of this writing.  I’m still puzzling it out.

All of this games are absolutely HORRIBLE!!

One of our favorites was rolling down whatever hill or incline was available inside cardboard appliance boxes, until the box was too torn up to use anymore.  Refrigerator boxes were the best, but washer, dryer, or even air conditioner boxes would do.

One game we loved to play was spinning around and around with our eyes closed until we were extremely dizzy then we would fall down and open our eyes and lie there watching the trees and clouds and everything else whirling around us. We played hide and seek in my cousin’s small basement. We would hide and then the person who was ‘it’ would turn off the light and make his way down the stairs and try to find us in the dark. We also enjoyed slithering through the crawl space under a neighbor’s huge old house, going in one side and out the other. At one point you had to make a right angle turn on your belly and squeeze through.  It seems to me there were about eight of us that would do this.  We’d have club meetings under there too in an area that was high enough to sit upright.  The home owners never knew about this, nor our parents who would have told us not to do it. And we spent a good bit of time climbing about on the roofs of some garages in the neighborhood. When my mother was out my brothers and I would play tightrope walker on the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.  We would play trampoline on our beds and would move the sofa away from the wall in the living room so we could straddle the high back and play cowboys. Knowing what we had been like as kids, I always wondered how my brothers dared to let their boys out of their sight.

What a hoot!  I only had sisters so maybe that made a difference but we didn’t play the lava game.  No, it was quicksand.  We had those cardboard brick like blocks and we’d make paths with them all over our rec room.  The couch, the little table and a big chair would be ‘houses’.  We’d have to walk from house to house without falling in the quicksand.  Somebody always did and then we had to rescue them with a jumprope.

Another game we played was ‘horsie’  This also involved a jumprope.  One person would be the horse and stand in front of the other person.  The person behind would throw the jump rope around the person in front to act as reigns.  The horsie would emit many neighing and whinnying sounds as the driver would says things like, “I must go to market now!  Giddyap!”  And then we’d be off, the horse prancing, the driver skipping along behind.

We played school a lot.  We had a big blackboard up on our wall in the rec room.  My mom had a bunch of old second hand readers.  One would be the old fashioned schoolmarm and the others would be the students, adopting a variety of ages and personalities.  Someone would be good and give the teacher an apple and someone would be naughty and have to be punished.  My older sister taught me to read playing school before I went to Kindergarten.

We put on lots of neighborhood shows.  Our rec room was the biggest playroom in the neighborhood so everyone played there.  We’d make up skits and dances to favorite songs from musicals.  Then we’d go out and recruit moms and older siblings to come and watch us.  I always enjoyed making the the tickets to hand out.

Out in our yard we had a huge pine tree that had tiny little pine cones.  No grass grew under the tree but the tree branches were tall enough that we could play very comfortably in the shade.  At the edge of all this was a very old stone barbecue pit.  Our mom gave us many cast off dishes, cracked cups etc. We spent hours in the cool shade, making not only mud/dirt pies but all kinds of concoctions, decorated with tiny pine cones, and then pretending to cook them on pit.  I distinctly remember making mud Easter eggs one time with our next door neighbor.  We were mad at my older sister who wouldn’t let us play with her and we planned to tell her they were chocolate and thus poison her.  This game eventually morphed into the game Witch which was a neighborhood favorite.  The witch lived in the pine tree house with her slaves who had to do her bidding and the rest lived on our front porch, which was the town that was being terrorized by the witch.

We also played a lot of Ghost in the Graveyard, softball, relay races and freeze tag.

My poor father would be dying for a break after work, but his 4 children wouldn’t get on board. So he would place a laundry basket full of balls beside him on the couch, turn on the news and shout “RUN!” We would then run back and forth across the large great room and try no tot get nailed by the balls he was whipping in our direction.
Seconded only by Dad’s outdoor game, “Bowling for Kids”. We had a giant red ball, like an exercise ball x3. We’d all start at one end of the yard, and he’d shout “Set ‘em up!”, at which time we’d run away from him as fast as we could. He’d roll the ball to take down the human bowling pins, and of course always took down the littlest and slowest child. It ended with him barking at us not to go in and tell Mommy what happened until the baby had stopped crying/bleeding.

Some of these are really funny!!
In the winter (when it is quite dark in the evening), the 6 kids in our family will turn off all of the lights in the house and play Romans versus Christians.
1 or 2 kids get flashlights and they are the Romans, and the rest are Christians. The object of the Romans is to capture the Christians, temporarily imprison them, set them free, and go get some more Christians to take back to the prison. The Christians can try to convert the Roman who is capturing them, and sometimes this works, but most of the time you get the 7-year old Christian yelling”, JESUS LOVES YOU! JESUS LOVES YOU!”

I’m the eldest of 5 and have all brothers… the brother next in age to me invented a brilliant game when he was in high school and babysitting one of the younger ones. He called it “Baby and Daddy”—the basic premise of the game is that the older person has to be the baby and lie in a bed for naptime while the younger person “reads” books and sings songs. For whatever reason, that’s a perennial favorite in the family, even though the youngest is now almost 8

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s we didn’t have TV for a number of years.  The 5 of us would play just about every game listed above in some version or other.  Add in a lot of snow games, reading until all hours of the night by the street light, sliding down the laundry shoot, climbing the pine tree above the 2nd story window, and falling off our trikes into the cactus on the corner!  But as we got a little older we also played Mass with the kids next door.  Necco candy made the best hosts; Mom’s doilies, wine cruets and a pedestal brass candy dish made it all so real.  @ Mary Delaney I am so sorry that adventurous fun and a broken bone or two are not in your history, I cannot imagine growing up in a sterile, dull environment. A little risky adventure brings lots of experience and stories for the grandkids!

Brought back such happy childhood memories! We played the lava/quicksand game, and a variation which involved the green & white tiles in the kitchen - green was ocean, white was sand.  The spinning til dizzy game was priceless. Because we lived on a farm, we had plenty of materials to build forts & places to do it. My kids don’t have half the fun we did, unfortunately.  For the rest of the summer, we’re going to use a new rule: if you have to argue, you must do it outside the house. I have 1 son & 3 daughters, the guy doesn’t fight with the girls very often but the girls, ages 15, 12 & 10, are constantly bickering. Out the door they go!

That lava game makes no sense. I played it with my cousins when we were young’uns, but it still makes no sense. If you were only couch-cushion-height above molten rock, you’d be dead pretty quickly whether you were touching it or not. It should just be another variation of The Dying Game.
   
Kids would know this if they didn’t have their brains rotted from watching those cartoons and playing those blasted video games where the characters can stand on metal platforms that just rose up out of the lava three seconds ago.
   
Yes, I’m kidding. Get off my lawn anyway.

Speaking of things you’re all doing wrong, My siblings and I used actual sleds to sled down the stairs. They weren’t exactly normal sleds, though. They were basically flexible sheets of plastic with holes cut in the front for handles. They slid really well over the carpet—even better than the sleeping bags.

When my younger kids get together with friends they sometimes play “Romans and Christians.” I think it was introduced by another mother trying to instill some wholesomeness or Christian values in their play. One group, usually a lot of boys, are the blood thirsty Romans who chase and try to capture the designated Christians (who are not so meek and mild and enjoy a lot of screaming, especially if they are girls). Once the Christians get captured and bound they usually try to escape in very dramatic ways - pretend machine guns, bombs, etc. It usually leads to arguing because the Romans want some realism and the Christians are all for dramatic escape. No one wants to be martyred.

During the summer, my kids enjoy outside night games which involve running in the dark - “Ghost in the Graveyard” or “Run from the Nazis” (must be German guilt). Only the “it” person has a light - which explains why our flashlights are all dead and our solar path torches are missing.

Ha ha.  Latecomer to this, as summer finally came here in earnest.  We are. so. tan…and the laundry pile just evolved into a beast with a central nervous system.  I actually have Kale (for smoothies) in my fridge as I write this.  LOL. Not that I’ve ever done this, but was pressured into it by a sort-of girlfriend.
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Yes, unstructured…so unstructured.  Not to say we didn’t try to kill each other with the semblance of structure in ping pong, tennis and backgammon.  Siblings higher on the totem pole succumbed to the temptation to CHEAT, and punish when they were losing or lose.  My sister also staged art competitions in which she was a competitor and sole judge…
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As a kid,I was so unstructured I created epic sand sculptures on the beach of naked men and women using natural accoutrements like seaweed and shells for natural detailing.  The old people chuckled, but nobody ever scolded.  (“Sweetie, where are your parents??”)
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Our favorite games were Blind Man’s Bluff, Dodgeball, (and various forms of this) Homemade teeter totters on saw horses, sleepovers in the treehouse and tents, bunnies, turtles, guniea pigs, fish, turtles, horses, gerbils, parakeets, cockatiels, ducks, chickens, dressing up the dogs for fashion shows, cutting open mud hens that my brother shot (ewwww their guts are green!)  Fishing, and putting giant catfish in the fountain,catching waves in the ocean (even during lightening storms) Blowing up giant bags of dog food with explosives from Tijuana, riding horses to the Nudey beach, and laughing at the wierdos, trips to the mall to buy the most high octane sugar-candy we could find, (which we would hide under our beds from our health nut Mom), catching frogs in the creek, water fights with giant sprinklers that we could control with our feet on the golf course, which was wholesome until they started using reclaimed water…
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Oops,I’m not sure what they are really up to, but my kids do variations on some of the above, some of it is even better, (paint balling, trampolines, hiking, wakeboarding, snowboarding, sledding down the stairs on cardboard) only they have the dreaded internet, XBox, Wii…(sigh) as well.

I think it’s interesting that most of the commenters here posted the games they played as kids rather than what their own kids play.  Maybe they’re not parents yet, or maybe most of their kids play these types of games outside of mom’s earshot.  Not sure what it says about me that I lurk outside the room when I hear them and don’t stop the antics until somebody’s really really close to losing an eye. 
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Just want to say that unlike so many here I will not badmouth the XBox or the Wii.  I love love love that *all* of my kids can play the same activity together sometimes for a couple of hours without there being too much fighting or even a single person getting hurt.  Just try to get my 16 year old daughter to play Steaming Hot Pit of Lava or Mush Doggie with her brothers!  But Just Dance or Zumba, she’ll be in there competing with her 7 year old brother for family champ - really none of the other brothers can come close to them, but they’ll certainly all try, even the 4 year old.  Plus, it’s exercise so it’s good for them, right?

I agree with Eileen when it comes to the type of video game that is made to be social and involves exercise. There are a bunch of them out there. My son’s young family loves guitar hero; they all get involved and it is quite physical as well. Parents just have to be careful of which one they choose, because some of them, the music ones in particular, have very over endowed and under dressed images, that are no part of developing a healthy body image/sexual appetite. So the games we played when young may have ended in a few stitches on the occasion, but the equally fun group oriented video games of today, have moral dangers to be vigilant about.

These are great! I don’t have any kids yet, but I babysit a set of three little boys under the age of 7, and they have come up with some doozies.

Bombs - everybody sticks a bucket on his head and they all throw “bombs” at each other. Pretty much the only rule of this one is “no hitting someone without a helmet”, so they can keep it up for hours.
Hide and Seek - occasionally the source of much panic on my part when they actually hide somewhere other than behind the couch.
Fort - the classic game of building something and not letting your brother in under any circumstances.
Superheroes - running around in capes and knocking each other over.
That’s Not Allowed - their very favorite. Involves a lot of “THAT’S NOT ALLOWED” at your brother at the top of your lungs whenever he does something you don’t like.

I’m the oldest of four, and up until we were in our mid/late teens we all had strict limits on computer and TV time. As a result, we came up with a LOT of other things to do.

Bucking Bronco - one person is the bronco and tries to buck off the person on his/her back.
Running Up The Slide - even more fun if your brother is trying to come down at the same time.
Sled - drag your sibling around on one of Mom’s afghans until she yells at you to stop tearing up her good blankets.
Easter Egg Hunt - hide plastic eggs around the house and then search for them. Mom never let us do this one during Lent.
Boxes - everyone fights over who gets the box from the new appliance, which can then turn into a house, cave, boat, etc.
Jumping Off The Stairs - yep, we did this one too.
Barbies - my sister and I basically wrote a sitcom in our tweens using the dolls, revolving around the lives of three princesses and their on-again, off-again boyfriends.
Communion - line up again and again to get a Mardi Gras doubloon stuck in your mouth.
Hide and Seek - Dad hides somewhere in the house, yelling out things like “I’m in the oven!” Kids, of course, immediately run to go look there…
Sardines - aka reverse Hide and Seek. Mom had to make rules about no hiding in the dryer for this one.
Trading Store - everyone hauls the stuff they don’t want out of their closets and sets up a table in front of their rooms, and then you go around making trades for each other’s stuff.

We also had a puppet theater, read a zillion books, did a lot of plays and home movies, and roughhoused all over the place with Dad (several baby teeth were lost that way). And somehow, we still found time to complain that we were bored!

I love this! It makes me feel so much better about last week when I let my kids and their friends make a catapult out of a board and an old burned stump and try to fling rocks into the woods.  They only got hit twice :) but it was terrifying to watch!  Also, my son and his uncle (when they were 4 and 8) tried to turn my son’s matress into a slip n’ slide. What a mess! I only had sisters while growing up (my brother came when I was 20), so most of our games where pretty tame. We played the lava game and Pioneers, where we’d pack uo our little red wagon with blankets, cookies and a bench we pretended was a cook stove and travel around the back yard.

Lots of similar games in my neighborhood in the 1960’s but we also played an elaborate game of King and Queen, with royal families, guards, soldiers, knights. If you were captured, you were put in jail under someone’s front porch and then brought out and “tortured.”

Best torture was finding two books in the house and making the person hold them straight out at arms’ length. Effectively painful without getting in trouble with any moms.

I have to teach a kid that form of torture so it gets passed on.

My children are still too small to be inventing games together, but I have to mention “Kickin’ Kangaroo,” which my brother and I played as children with three of our friends. It was quite simple - one person was the “kangaroo,” and the rest were hunters, outfitted with jump ropes—to tie up the kangaroo—and any other backyard toys useful for hunting. I don’t believe we used baseball bats. Since we played in our fenced-in yard, the kangaroo was invariably cornered, brought down and tied up, after a protracted and violent struggle. I recall experiencing a sort of animal terror as the hunters closed in on me. Remarkably, there were never any serious injuries. After reading this article, I can’t help but wonder whether our parents knew what we were doing.

My daughters made up a game called “Chickenasaurus!”  They would initiate the game by calling “Chickenasaurus!” at which point the “Momma Chickenasaur” would have to protect the “Baby Chickenasaur” from a vicious predator (sibling and/or childrens friends) while also battling the predators (who would sing “Chickenasaurus! Chickenasaurus! Gonna eat, goona eat chickenasaurus!” - to the tune of the background music from “Caveman” starring Ringo Star) The game was over when the “Momma Chickenasaur” hunted down and killed all the predators to protect her baby.

Addendum: Or the baby was eaten…

@Eileen, I have a love/hate relationship with video games.  I have had to broker endless altercations over “turns” “controllers” “One player vs. two player etc.  They regularly harvest batteries from my TV remote control when they are desperate to beat the boss or kill some Alien.  Yes, I have enjoyed some blissful, “Oh thank God they are occupied” time too.  My biggest problem with Xbox, besides seeing them play it in a dark room when it is beautiful outside, is discovering the little boys, crouched in the corner, watching their older brothers play Call of Duty, Halo, or something like that.  I had to intervene to stop the four-year-old from playing Halo, when his brothers swelled with pride one evening at dinner over how good he was.  When they are playing Xbox “live” with marines in Iraq, it kind of startles me, and yes, sometimes the “F” bomb is thick in the air.  But nothing startled me so utterly as when my sweetfaced preschooler literally got sand kicked in his face at the park, and I overheard his reaction.  He didn’t cry, he didn’t tattle, he *lowered* his voice, put his face a couple of inches from the offending kid’s face and told him menacingly “You know I can kick the shi** out of you.”  That’s when I forbid him to even enter the big boy gaming room…which somehow fades from his memory after a few days.  Oh, and by the way, he *is* a really sweet kid—says he wants to be a priest!

*GAG* Kale smoothies… (Mum is a vegetarian. Granted she’s an Osteoarthritis->lets remove her kneecaps->vegetarian->ballerina Vegetarian. But she still makes me eat Kale whenever I go to her house for dinner.)

Three words: Duck Duck Dodgeball.

If you can dodge a wrench, you can- GOOSE!

What fun! Brings back great childhood memories!

In a troll-free environment no less..how refreshing!

anna lisa—I have a 5 yo just like the preschooler you describe!

These comments are so funny, nice to know everyone else’s family is just as crazy as ours!
We also did the sleeping bag toboggan down the stairs, actually got our older uncle and our mother! to try it.
Me and my 1-year older sister played a game called “whips and chains” which involved a huge club-like stick and an old bicycle chain.  We’d chase each other around the garage flailing with the club or swinging the chain.  The frightening part was that whoever was being chased could suddenly cry “change” and you were honor bound to turn and become the chasee.  The turn-around was usually the point the chain would flick the back of your bare legs, or receive a swipe from the club.
We also played a game called stocking cap, which wasn’t violent but the aim was to seriously embarrass the other player by leading them face covered by a stocking hat into weird places and leaving them there.  The stocking capped person had to count slowly to 10 before removing the cap to see where they had been left.  My sister and I actually played this into highschool!
Ah, the good old days of unrestricted, unsupervised, spur-of-the moment play!

My 4- and 2-year-old boys play a game the 4yo has named “Tigers in the Mood for Food, Dude.”  Basically, they “kill” the red little tikes table (red=meat, which can be antelope, zebra, all kinds of things) and literally gnaw on it.  The blue little tikes chairs are the water.  I have caught them licking it with their tiger tongues.  This can entertain them for at least 30 minutes at a time.

Corita, try to imagine yourself when you were a new, idealistic mother. :D!! If I had been shown that little interchange I spoke of above, at that sweet little park, where everyone has sweet, sweet, sheltered kids (until about the fifth grade), I might have needed a sedative. I was that kind of new mother who said “no guns, no weapons no violent cartoons!”  My poor little firstborn only got Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers etc…Soon he was gnawing his carrots into guns, and making tinker toy knives, swords, and various weapons, despite my vigilance and lectures.  So when a new Mom once expressed horror to me that Elmer Fudd said “Kill the wabbit!” in her toddler son’s presence, I couldn’t help but belly laugh, and offer condolences.
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Hey, where’s Simcha? Did I miss the vacation memo? I need my laugh fix and the mother in me is starting to worry!

I’ll be back tomorrow, Anna Lisa - thanks for missing me!

Awesome info and straight to the point. I am not sure if this is in fact the best place to ask but do you folks have any idea where to employ some professional writers? Thanks

My twins put a blanket between them and wrestle- they’ve done it ever since they’ve been able to divebomb each other, so about 10 1/2 years.  I think this goes all the way back to the womb.  It doesn’t interest any of the others one bit.

Mostly at random one will yell “I’m a cheetah” or “I’m a T-rex” or something else similar and then they start acting it out will the others scream and run away.  My youngest actually got wise and responds by rolling her eyes and saying things like “well I’m a eagle and I just flew away, nyah!”

My three-year-old niece has taught me a game.  I have no idea where this comes from since, according to her parents and siblings, they never taught this to her.  She and I will be sitting on the bed and she’ll “die”.  Cue dramatic death sequence here.  Upon her death, I am supposed to pound on her chest and yell “BREATHE!” as loudly as I can, at which time she comes back to life and happiness ensues.  Sometimes, I get to be the dead one.  Eventually, it became “pound on the chest fast or you get a vampire instead”.  This child doesn’t watch movies or shows with vampires in them.

When she comes over to see my kittens (last time she informed me that she was going to stay at my house and be my baby forever - don’t think I’m naive enough to believe that it was me and not the kittens that prompted this response), we usually take them into the master bathroom and shut the door so the dogs who are gleeful at having “their” kid over will leave us alone.  She will sit on the side of the bathtub; I sit on the floor.  She slides back into the bathtub (no water, of course) and it’s my job to be “sad” because “my baby is dead”.  At which point she pops up out of the tub and I get to rejoice because “my baby is NOT dead”.

All this is done gleefully, but I would give anything to know where she learned these “games”.

Ginger it only takes once for a young child to see something in a movie, or on TV, even those kids that hardly watch media. Once is enough to stick with her to where she wants to act it out.  It sounds like she saw a medical drama of some kind. She will most likely get it out of her system when the next big impression hits her. Perhaps this would be a case for exposing her to something else that makes an impression, but ok for a little kid; with parents permission of course!  Maybe other’s will think she needs to talk about peril, death, and dying, but to my mind that is what she is doing in acting it out, and it sounds like she is too young for anything more than assurance of her own safety no matter what happens in life.

i love this game this is so nice