Search for:

Flashback Friday, The Late Edition ~ Puzzles & Games

This is the Friday Late Night Edition of Flashback Friday
brought to you by Quilldancer.

Flashback Friday is the brain child of Linda from Mocha With Linda. This is the meme that takes us back in time to the days of our youth. Linda says, This meme’s purpose is to have us take a look back and share about a specific time or event in our lives. It will be fun to see how similar – or different – our experiences have been! This week Linda wants us to share our memories of our favorite puzzles and games.

My cousin Patty had every board game under the sun. This was our favorite at her house. We played it two or three times per day, but only during bad weather. If the weather was at all tolerable, we weren’t allowed in the house. Patty and I also enjoyed playing Trouble and Parcheesi.

With my Weniger cousins the games usually involved more thinking or Math.  They were all super-fast at putting puzzles together and doing math in their heads.  I hated putting puzzles together with them. They’d place 8-9 pieces to my one — and despite the fact that we were all kids, the puzzles were generally no smaller than 250 pieces.  However, of all the the entertainment choices we had, we almost always played Kismet — Kismet was like Yahtzee, but the dice were colored and one had to get color and number combinations in order to meet one’s quotas.

At my house we had two favorite games.  One –BINGO! — took hours to play because we’d each have 6 cards and we always played to blackout.  The other game, however, was really our favorite — Cooties! This photo (found on the internet) could actually be my game.  This is the original 1949 edition my family and friends were still playing in 1969 and for all I know is still in a cupboard in Grandma’s house (my cousin lives there now).

However, my favorite games of all were the outdoor games.  Of course we played tag of various different kinds and incarnations.  We even played bicycle tag that was a lot like flag football.  We’d clothespin bandannas to our shirt sleeves.  If the person who was “It” snatched your bandanna away, then you became, “It.”  The game often involved bike crashes, but I don’t remember anybody ever getting hurt.

Another outside favorite was baseball.  There was a huge field about 3 blocks from our house.  We were allowed to play baseball there because none of us could possibly hit a window.  Previous to playing in that field, we played on the school grounds, but I somehow managed (at 10 years old) to hit the baseball with enough force to drive it 100 yards to the fence, over the fence, across the street, and through the window on Tapley’s Cabinet Shop.  It was a pure fluke, but even so it got us banned from the immediate neighborhood.

A couple of my girlfriends and I liked to play hopscotch, jump rope, and Chinese jump rope, but the boys didn’t care for them and since there was about an even mix of boys and girls that played together, we didn’t frequently indulge in those “girly” games.

In my teen years when I lived with my father and step-mother, we almost always played a game or two of cards after dinner.  We played Acey-Duecy, Canasta, and Michigan Rummy.  Sometimes we’d play Cribbage, too.  On Friday nights my dad, step-mom and I always went to the Baker’s house and played a progressive rummy game that my sister now calls 3-13.  I can’t recall what name we gave it then, but I do know it was different.

My very most cherished game playing memories of all come from the hours I spent playing Rummy with my friend, Mary.  I rarely ever beat her.  I’m lucky if I can remember a card 20 seconds after I play it.  She knew where every card in the deck was at all times.  It wasn’t so much the card playing that made my time with Mary special.  It was the friendship and the laughter.

20 Comments

  1. Acey Duecy was one of my all time favorite games. We played it all the time in high school. Dont ask me how we got our money to bet with but we always had it Haven’t played it since. But what a great fun game. Thanks for bringing it up.

      1. Ours was dollars Q…One dollar bills LOL I lost my ass plenty of times…If they could only see it now they’d realize I have plenty ass to lose now LOL

  2. I enjoyed reading your memories. I mentioned cooties in my post too! Some of my best childhood memories are from summer evenings spent playing huge games of neighborhood tag, hide and seek and kick the can.

    Enjoy your weekend!

    1. Joyce — the best time to play hide-n-seek is after dark. We’d get 8-10 kids and play in Kohler’s apple orchard. It was a blast.

  3. Some of these are familiar but some I have never heard of. But the interaction, as you said at the end, is usually what makes it so fun.

  4. Several people have mentioned Cooties and I don’t remember it at all. I also never heard of Acey Duecy with cards.

    I think it’s funny that whenever boys and girls play together, the boys won’t play the “girl” games, but the girls will play the “boy” games!

  5. My daughter and I often play Trouble and she usually beats me everytime! Those darn 6s never seem to come up for me.

    Mousetrap is such a classic! But made more flimsily today than in yore, boo hoo.

    Sounds like you had a great time outdoors as a kid. We did too.

    Thanks for popping in on me, Quilly! Appreciate it.

  6. it’s funny that other than bingo and yahtzee everythign sounds alien to me although i’m pretty sure we played similar games but called them differently (which can hardly be surprising)

  7. .
    Nice and thorough, Quilly. 🙂
    Our youngest daughter had Cooties! My game cupboard photo is the one she played with along with quite a few others. You will recognize a lot of them.

    Outside games are the funnest aren’t they? Even our dog, Adi, likes to go outside for some game playing. You couldn’t go wrong with Bingo. Unless the games lasted too long. I learned Yatzee from my ex-in-laws. That and cribbage.
    ..

    1. Actually, Jim, I’ve discovered I missed mentioning of lot of my favorite games — Chinese Checkers, Masterpiece, Risk, Monopoly, Life, and I didn’t mention that I used to play solitare while watching TV, either!

  8. I never played mousetrap, but as a kid I remember the commericials and all the fancy colourful looking gizmos and gadgets and thinking about how much I wanted that game!

    1. Teresa — you really didn’t miss much. There was a lot of anticipation in building the game. Everyone wanted to be the last player who tripped the mouse trap, but once it was tripped everything was over in seconds and the game fell apart. So, an hour of build up for 15 seconds of fun.

  9. We didn’t have any puzzles we did have lotto which is similar to bingo. Mostly we played out in the back street, cricket, rounders and skipping. No wonder we were slim and healthy.

  11. I loved Parcheesi!
    The neighborhood I grew up in had a playfield where we held pick-up games of baseball, football, kickball, and just about any game you can imagine. Sometimes it devolved into a free-for-all game we called “smear the queer” — something that was never meant as a slur — it just meant that one person was “it” and everyone else tried to tackle him or her and “dogpile” on top. It usually was played with a football, but any ball (or frisbee or whatever) would do. We even played it on bicycles a few times; however, I do not recommend playing tackle football and dog-piling with bicycles!

Comments are closed.