Most of my games involved heavy use of the imagination and creativity, whether inside or out.
For example, I lived for a while on a huge plot of wooded land that had some cliffs, a pond, some open fields, and some big dirt piles. Over the course of five or so years (from 1st to the summer after 5th grade), my friends and I built an “empire” all over the property… we built cities out of old junk, treeforts, piled up rocks, etc., we had a “navy” that consisted of a dock made out of plywood on the pond and a rubber raft. We had an armory where we stored spears and bows and arrows we made, and we also had a number system, an alphabet, a monetary system, a bank, a religion, and a military hierarchy. I was the Emperor and my best friend was the head of the military. We named our “cities” and landmarks after each other… often imitating the Soviet system of nomenclature. For example, one of our towns was called Ruthergrad after my friend whose last name was “Rutherford.” We spent many warm days expanding our towns, building new ones, exploring new parts of the woods, making weapons, playing with fireworks, cooking food outside, shooting our bows, “training” with our spears, and gathering raw materials to build new stuff out of… oh, and sailing on our pond and spearfishing and catching frogs and snakes.
It was awesome. I still have one of the maps we made and some of our coins. Most of the stuff we built is probably still out there, being overtaken by nature and beginning to look like a ruin. Everything had to be abandoned overnight when my mom went through a messy divorce with the man who owned the property. Maybe some archaeologists in the future will find the remains of our pretend civilization and wonder what kind of bizarre anomalous society it was.