Let’s turn off the TV, put away the board games, and toss the deck of cards in the trash.
Yes, it’s time to play all the made up games you played as a kid. Let’s chat about some of the greatest:
• Erupting volcano (also known as Snake Pit or Shark Tank). Here’s where you pretend the floor is covered in molten lava and you have to jump across the furniture without falling in. Sweatsocks on slippery coffee tables, ottomans with wheels, and top-heavy bookcases can be dangerous. House rules dictate whether riding the Golden Retriever across the room is allowed. Either way, I’m pretty sure you can use a blanket as a life raft to get to dinner.
• Kitchen Rock Band. Grab all the pots and pans you can find, steal a handful of wooden spoons, and set up your kit on the cold linoleum floor. Now most makeshift kids bands are all drums – or percussive ensembles, if you will – so bonus points are awarded for anybody bringing in new instruments. Tip: Rubber bands over empty tissue boxes add a banjo section.
• Indoor baseball. Never popular with the parents this is where you simply swing a mini baseball bat at a tennis ball in the front hallway. Feel free to set up a GI Joe and Cabbage Patch Kid stadium seating area, create bases around the house, and keep playing until something shatters.
• Cardboard roll swordfights. Remember those long and thin cardboard rolls left over when mom finished wrapping the Christmas presents? Those were perfect for trumpeting announcements around the house, practicing robot voices, or using as pirate telescopes. After that they made for great lightsaber duels, Robin Hood swordfights, or gentle beating sticks. Finally, after a giant whack to your brother’s forehead caused them to spiral apart it was time for some nun chucks battles. Everybody wins.
• Any game involving leftover cardboard. Yeah, speaking of leftover cardboard, the holy grail of made up childhood games was when your parents got something delivered in a giant cardboard box. A new fridge or oven could meant months of fun inside a new basement stronghold.
• Store. Here’s where you empty out your kitchen pantry, put everything on the floor, and sell it back to your parents.
Yes, made up games you played as a kid let creativity roam wild to the outer edges of our brains. Rules are invented and changed, action takes over the living room, and big-eyed fun, screaming smiles, and sweaty foreheads crash together in a great big bang on Saturday afternoon.
AWESOME!
For all the kids out there who love reading check out Penguin Canada’s fantastic new website Razorbill!
I have two little kidds chained to my bed
You can only do this if you have the equipment for it
I would play a game with my toys, where a family moved to a rich new city, and they weren’t very rich so the kids got bullied and them the girl left her family to join her boyfriends gang… Or my horses were politicians and by the end of the game the first horse president got murdered by the suceedng president. I was a weird kid
I remember when my parents redid our whole kitchen, and my sister and I were more happy about the stove box, dishwasher box and the cabinet boxes. We had a whole castle built down in the basement, complete with toilet paper tube fences, blankets, coffee table and couch cushions. We also used to play a game with this electric fence called “touch it, wimp”. We played (my favorite) game, called “waterpark” with me, my sister, and the two kids across the street. We would hook up the hose and fill our plastic sled with water and we had a small playhouse with a slide that we soaked. We dug a hole and filled it with mud and we got out pretty much every watertight vessel in the house and played. Our mother absolutely hated this game. We also played “i dare you to bike down that”. Pretty self explanatory.
You could play a game with your six year old or younger a game I hate playing but queens and princesses
Thanks for the memories. The box that says “School” is so funny. Remember when children played outside. Cool site!
i played this game where the entire house is this planet called monstrosidus and the tv was this interdimentional servalence thing, then monstosudus was this bridge dimention so people from different places could come and live in harmony together, there were the cuteopians, the infinities the skyladers and like a milion other things, they mostly came from a dimentional prison ( the store) and my sisters room was a thing called cloud kingdom, the first floor was a huge dessert, my brothers room was the unknown land, mine was a huge library where all the knowledge was and chairs and beds were bouncy mountains, me and my siblings were gods and goddesses. We were strange children.