Games we used to play before PlayStation made our fingers and thumbs sore

When I was a kid, most of my free time was spent playing outside with the other kids in the neighbourhood. We also made the most of breaks at school. We kept ourselves quite occupied without any of today’s modern technologies.

We only needed the most rudimentary of equipment – if any at all.

Marbles – Marbles is a game that has been played for many years and there are lots of different ways to play.

One of the first things to make sure of is if you are playing “keepsies” or not. Most of the time, all the marbles are given back to the original owner at the end of the game, but sometimes players keep the marbles they win. You always need to state which way you are playing before a game begins.

A circle is drawn on the ground, usually with a diameter of 3-6 feet. You can use chalk on the sidewalk or use thread or string to make a circle on the carpet. Marbles are placed inside the circle, usually near the centre.

The goal of each shot is to hit one of the marbles in the centre and knock it out of the circle. If a player knocks a marble out, then they get to keep the marble for the rest of the game and they also get to take another turn. If no marble is knocked out of the circle, the other player then gets a turn.

The player with the most marbles at the end of the game is the winner.

Indoor games

There were indoor games aplenty in the “olden” days. Cards were a favourite. Like Pest, which is the forerunner to the now-popular built-for-purpose card packs called Uno.

Pest could also be tweaked – for instance, instead of the following player ‘eating’ five cards when a joker is played, this could be changed to ‘eating’ 10 cards or in Extreme Pest, ‘take the rest of the pack’. This could be devastating to the ‘eater’, who sometimes would have to resort to laying his cards out before him, as he is unable to hold his over-inflated pack.

Extreme Pest was sometimes played with two packs, which would mean even bigger packs for the poor eaters!

Then, of course, before PS, there were board games: Monopoly, Risk, Careers, Cluedo and Totopoly. Monopoly in South Africa included the cities of Durban, Bloemfontein (Durbanites hated the fact that their city was worth less than Bloem), Cape Town and Johannesburg.

This could be tweaked into something called Nigert, where players did not have to wait until they had a ‘whole suit of colours’ before building houses but could build on individual sites and even start straight with a hotel instead of building patiently with houses. Nigert also had an inflation figure attached to it, which wreaked havoc with the value of your money (South Africans have always associated well with this).

Risk was all about taking over the world – there was also a derivative called World Game, where countries were also allocated minerals such as gold, oil, coal and were worth more than others. You had to have a certain amount of mineral wealth to survive and have the money to attack other countries to annex their minerals.

Cluedo is the much-loved detective game and Totopoly the horse racing game where you have to buy and train horses for the big day.

Chess, of course, was standard and became more interesting with the advent of computer chess games.

Hide and seek

This is a child’s game and not the strange one, one sees on the Internet these days. It is fun to involve more than one person…. Hide someplace where you think your opponent won’t find you. Once you are convinced he/she has passed you, run as quick as you can to the designated ‘base’ to ensure your safety. Remember that your opponent will shout out, counting to 10 before yelling ‘coming, ready or not’.

Cowboys and crooks

This was a favourite, sparked by a plethora of Terence Hill, Clint Eastwood and other home movies (watched on the wall using an old-fashioned projector, hired from the film shop, long before video and video machines). Toy guns are not a necessity – wooden sticks, imagination and a keenness to die slowly and dramatically are all needed. The crooks do not always lose.

However, sometimes you get a bad loser who, despite taking a barrage of rapid fire, does not die. When this happens, the opponents can resort to an old-fashioned tackle – a kind of Italian footballer tackle that puts the refusing-to-die fellow down for good.

Bicycle races

You can even race against yourself. Use a watch to time yourself. You can pretend you are a famous Formula One racer and award yourself and your favourite driver points according to your lap times. This is handy if you don’t particularly like Lewis Hamilton and you can make him lose to a rank outsider from Ecuador just by riding your own bicycle slower on the lap where you pretend to be Hamilton!

Cricket using a dice

Epic test matches can be played. Write down your two test match teams and the names of your batsmen on a piece of paper – you can have South Africa versus England for instance. Roll a dice – six is six runs, four four runs, three three runs, two two runs, one one run… a five means you go under review. If you throw a three, you are safe. Any other number on the dice and you are out and the next batsman is in.

And then there is music to listen to… Some old South African favourites to remind you of LM Radio, John Berks, John Novik, Springbok Radio, Squad Cars and Gruesome Gresh.

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