i used to rake up all of the leaves in my front yard with my best friend when we were like ten then we would make like fake walls and form a “leaf house” and we would have our own rooms with little spaces without leaves we used as doors to walk through to get to each “room”. haha it seemed so much cooler when i was little.

@vegelizabeth
That actually sounds fun. XD

yeah haha it was ! we did the same with snow :x

touch myself it was a great game as a kid now it is just creepy

We had a strip of tar on the road in my street and plenty of kids. We played ‘Earth and Venus’ evening after evening. Boys on ones side, girls on the other with one side invading and one defending. Lots of fun and running around. The crazy thing is that when we changed from being Earth to being Venus, we physically moved to the other side of the tar.

My step-brother and I had this ongoing imagination based game where we would act out an ongoing war between the “good guy base” and the “bad guy base.” He would always be Goku, from Dragon Ball Z, and I would always be a character I made up that was part Sayan, part Jedi. We would, along with the help of Han Solo, Piccolo, some pokemon, the US Marines, the Ninja Turtles, and dozens of other assorted good guys, go to war with the bad guys, who consisted of Satan, Darth Vader, zombies, and even the Taliban every Sunday morning before church. This war lasted from elementary school up until we were about 10 years old when we became too cool to play the game anymore.

From age 9 or so until about age 12 or 13, my best friend and I had an “empire” on my step-dad’s large plot of wooded property that we called “Myrhh.” We had roads, “cities,” a navy that consisted of a rubber raft on our pond, a space program (consisting of model rockets), a made up language, writing, and number system, and even a postal service. We also made functional bows and arrows and even a small cannon that we used.

Flashlight tag. We’d all start off on our own, and play in the steam tunnels of UCSD, or at the San Diego Mission. If you “tagged” someone with your flashlight, they were on your team. At the end of the game, everybody was on the same team, and everybody won. We’d then all jump up and down and say, “We won! We won!” and then we’d play again.

My cousin and I used to play space rangers and we would make up lists of all are powers and things we could eat. Haha. Then we would go on “secret missions” around the block. We also made up special names for ourselves lol.

These all sound awesome.

Did anyone else play in the supermarket if there were different colored tiles? The dark ones were land, meaning they were alright to stand on, but the light colored ones were hot lava that would kill you.

My poor mother had to deal with two screaming children jumping around the grocery store…

@squidcake Haha I did that too lol… And I counted every step I took lol.

@squidcake i did that pretty much everywhere i went . :) hahahaha

Something similar to Calvinball, but with chestnuts, rollerskates, old unused phone cords and sticks. I was a lonely kid…

great question !!

My brother and I would set traps for each other. One of us would stack books on top of the partially opened door, and call the other. When that person walked in, the books would fall on them.
We lived in fear that some day they would fall on one of my parents.

oh i got one! It’s kind of a game in a way, the pretending aspect of it. My friend Kevin and I used to roam around the Florida woods, and I wore a cowboy hat, and we pretended to be explorers. We called one tree, that was connect to other trees with a solid entanglement of vines you could climb on, “The Great Wall”, the lake was of course: “Outlaw Lake” lol – and we carved “Outlaw Lake” into the biggest tree with our pocket knives. There was another place, that was far out – you had to pass through the woods, then through an open field area, then go through a maze of trees and small dirt hills rolling through the thick woods, before you came to this open jungle type area with tall trees and giant green leaves, and leafy vines dangling. We called that area, “Phantom’s Lair” lol after the movie “The Phantom” that was out. Perfect name for such a hidden, “phantom”, place lol

There was another game we did in every section of the woods, where there were different kinds of trees that were connected in different ways: get from here to way over there, without touching the ground, stay in the trees, and stay as high up as you can. Now that was a fun game. Almost like the: “The carpet is made out of lava!!!” game we did inside a few times. Trees were more fun lol While we’re on trees, the other thing we did was just jump off the tree into the great viney unknown lol, since all the trees had vines crisscrossing every which way, and there were a bunch of small branches, nesting on top of thicker branches, you could never really fall and hit the ground, you’d always get caught by something or other. That’s all I can remember right now. Just lots of great tree games and outlaw exploring activity in the woods lol

My neighbors and I Ages 10 (with me being the oldest), 9, 9, 8 and 5 played “farm” for a good 3 months straight.
We used giant blankets as rooms of the house and spread them out in the yard in a square. We used baby dolls and stuffed dogs as our children/pets. The giant tree on the side of the house was our “corn” and we would pick the leaves off and put them in a basket for our “dinner”. The stepping stones that led to the backyard were the chicken coops. The giant bush in the front of the house was the cows imagine milking a bush. Bikes were our horses so we could ride into town one lap around the court was a trip to town. The parking island in the middle of our court was generally anywhere that wasn’t our “house”. Sometimes other peoples front yard would be another place as well.
The story was it was the 1800’s and our parents died and left us to take care of the babies and the farm. We were all sisters.

We would wake up in the morning and one of us would go round up everyone. “Can Madison come out and plaaaayyy?” We’d play through lunch, only taking breaks for freeze pops. We all seemed to eat dinner around the same time, so we’d pause the “game” and come back after dinner. We’d stay out until the streetlight came on. Then We’d just start the game back where we left it in the morning.
This went on for about three months.

When we weren’t playing farm, we were making up all kinds of games. Before both of our neighbor boys moved, we often played random games where they had to battle to the death and win our hearts while we had picnics on the giant play castle in one of the boy’s backyard. We had a tar line that stretched from one curb to another our court is a giant square that made the perfect starting line for races. So we quite often held races of all kinds. We were so in shape now that I think about it.

There were times where one of my neighbors and I would sit on the front porch all day and play Pokemon with the link cables, then go inside and play with all the Pokemon figures and pretend they were real-life sized. We were the best trainers in the world. Our bikes would become Pokemon as well.

We played a lot of games, but these are the ones that we invented. Our imaginations were fantastic.
It’s so strange, to think about it.
Before we had cell phones, before we were all internet addicted. Before we all stopped talking. We were all so care-free. We didn’t care what we wore, we didn’t care what we looked like after running around all day. Man, I miss that.
Oh shit. Am I ranting?

what imaginations we used to have !! :) hahaha

“We” unless otherwise specified, refers to myself and my sister.

There was one of those little vending machines in the farmer’s market where for a quarter you could get a little rubber ball. Whoever owned that machine got rich off my sister and me.
We would take was was probably 60–80 of those little balls and go into my sister’s room, close the door, and then throw them in all directions. They would bounce off the ceiling, and the walls, and it was absolutely crazy.

Another similar thing involved tennis balls. Our house is on a hill, so from the street you have to walk up stairs to get to the front porch. Then, going in the front door, there is a stairway going upstairs. We used to get bags and bags of tennis balls from our neighbor. We’d open the front door, and go to upstairs. From the top of the stairs we’d pour literally hundreds of tennis balls down the stairs, and they’d go out the front door, and down the front steps, and into the street, and onto the neighbors’ front lawns and down driveways and into back yards. Then we’d dare each other to retrieve them.

Inspired by the “Survivor” reality show, we’d spend hours standing on cinder blocks in the back yard, seeing who could remain the longest. We’d start in the afternoon, and stay there until our mother called us in for dinner. Then we’d lie, and promise to jump off at exactly the same time so that it would be a tie, and when neither of us jumped, we’d do it again, until our mother called us again, and we’d run into the house and argue about who won.

We used to steal candles and matches and make small fires in empty soup cans in the back of the yard where our parents couldn’t see, adding dried leaves and twigs to keep it going.

We used to tie random objects to trees. The biggest was a big plastic horse that we hoisted up into a huge tree in the back of the yard, and secured with rope. It’s still there.

We used to set up obstacle courses in the house on rainy days, and outside in good weather. We’d usually spend the better part of the day making them, and only have time to run them once or twice before it got too late to be outside anymore.

In the summer we’d dump water on each other’s heads from the second story window, with the other person standing outside underneath.

There was a game that our cousins taught us, which involved putting your palms together, and holding them out in front of you. Then someone else would put their arms out, and would try to clap the other person’s hands. The person with their hand together would jerk their arms upward or downward to avoid getting clapped. We’d do it until out hands were bleeding. It was awesome.

We used to roll each other around in garbage cans. I used to push my sister around in the wheelbarrow.

Then there were games involving the eating of worms and bugs…

@rangerr: If you’re ranting, then I am too.

Watch out, the floor is lava!

@rangerr
Dude, that’s amazing. I remember playing those games that would last for months.

Me and some friends had one that we would resume every recess (we just called it “Family.”) We were the Baker family.
It originated from us learning about the Gold Rush of 1848 and so we were miners. But we never did any mining, because of course we were Bakers.
We would make “pancakes” out of mud by flattening them on rocks and “cooking” them by leaving them to dry.

This lasted at least 2 months…

Great question and stories.
Countless… but one that’d be sort of different was an “Action comic”.

Drawing scenes and lots of small characters, then me and my friend would develop the ‘battle’ and decide the outcome. All drawn on, peww peww—on paper hehe.

@rangerr that was beautiful! It reminded me of another phase in my life with my friend DJ. The first thing my friend DJ ever said to me was “Charmeleon can level up and become Charizard” lol This was my first introduction to Pokemon as well. I was thinking “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I like that you said it anyways”, and that’s when I understood DJ had an active imagination, and that I could say anything I wanted to him, and he would feed off of it. That’s when I knew we were going to be friends. I still talk to him, and he is still so open its amazing, he inspires me: the guy who wants to open up fully and not even care, but can’t always do so around everyone.

One thing we did was sit in his living room, at his computer (our first ventures with computers), and play with the voice recording “game” lol! It was so fun, we would make 10 second clips, of us in slow motion: I would say something outrageous, and then he would just make a noise, that was out of this world. And we also made a few several minute long stories, with that slow motion voice. God only knows what they were about. They always started off with some bizarre beginning, like… “Jed the crystal farmer was coming come from working on the crystal moon. He walked in the door and thats when…” and then some bizarre event. We even burned CD’s (when CD burning was new), and interspersed tracks we made, with music we liked. it was like the ultimate CD. DJ’s parents thought it was hilarious. I don’t think I ever tried letting my parents listen to it, I was too embarassed. But DJ’s parents were great, and encouraging. They were characters. His dad was the ultimate Pennsylvanian German redneck: goatee, beer belly, no shirt, red skin, beer in hand, burping, and swearing. But he was funny!

Then we progressed to lego story lines. We made our own ships and characters and settings. They were definitely inspired by Star Wars, but we made up our own names. DJ’s lead character was “Annon” (I’m happy I remember these details! lol), who was one of those extremely evil looking lego villians, with fire bangs painted on the face, and a scowl from hell lol and mine was an old guy, with gray hair, and a beard, unassuming, with a blue hat, but yet, he had more powers than anyone ever heard of. We built their ships, and had them fly to different planets. One of the planets they went to was “Bogden”, the blackest planet imaginable. It was scorched and dead and black everywhere. It’s southern hemisphere was an astroid cluster, a remnant of when the planet was destroyed by evil entities. It was inhabited by the worst creatures ever, the “Creetons”, who were jelly like, tall and menacing black goo, with black hair on their back that chased you and envoloped you into the blackness of the planet. Your character had to stay off the ground if he wanted to survive. We used a few Star Wars planets, but made up about 9 of our own, they were all different: the black planet, the desert planet, etc and had their own names. We even drew a map of what they would look like, and what their sizes were and what not. We had our characters build a gladiator fighting arena enterprise, on Coruscant. It was a floating arena, with liquid borders (this was before Ep.III), and was the size of the Death Star lol. I think the happy ending was that my character got married and built his own dream hobbit like house with a family, and celebrated his 10,000th birthday lol and Annon would be there for him any time he needed him.

DJ actually writes stories that are just as detailed and incredible today. He writes with a passion. I credit the growth of our creativity to that stuff.

I remember many fantasy series on TV and the Movies from The Planet of the Apes to Sinbad’s Voyages. There were always action figures as well. Invariably on his motorcycle Evel Knevel who would jump the huge divide of a puddle as a stand in for the Snake River canyon. Comic book characters also figured prominently and it was a constant evolution from Batman to the Silver Surfer or any obscure character that struck our fancy that week from the comics.
Nearby there was a whole series of low and long buildings that some people had on large properties far back in their yards. They may have been dairy farms at one time. We would come back on early summer evenings and climb on to these low structures with our “utility belts” adorned with gadgets and pocket knives respective of our characters super powers. It was always thrilling to be up on these roofs at night knowing we weren’t supposed to be up there. We imagined that we were looking out from skyscrapers on Gotham City on some mission. We were always outside though. It was magic.

@vegelizabeth I played leaf house too.

Well, a main one was an actual board game that my brother and I made up. We took the Sorry board and modified the game using a deck of playing cards and Lite Brite pegs. It was actually a pretty complicated game, but it was really fun. :)

Also, my siblings and I would do this whole Olympicsesque thing in the backyard where we would have various events and games that we created (originally my sister’s idea). One of my favorites was this one where we put numbers on pieces of paper and hid them around the yard and someone had to take a water gun and shoot them (as targets) in order from 1–50 and of course the fun part was finding them and seeing numbers later in the sequence and trying to remember where you saw them. I came up with that one. It also included things like an obstacle course and we had a million different games for various sprinklers.

And of course I always used to play versions of “school” and “house” that I would create with my friends, who were all girls…haha.

@chamelopotamus Wow, that sounds like one cool guy.

Also, did any of you guys have you own modified rules to games? Or just…rules in general? Like, stupid things you did?

I have to admit that me and my friend Tamara were obsessed with Legolas from Lord of the Rings (Felloship of the Ring movie had just come out).

We each had our own tiny, framed picture of him (this is getting ridiculous, I know…) and before we would each lunch we’d have to wait until either Legolas started “eating” or “gave us permission” to start eating.

Some days this meant we wouldn’t eat our lunch at all. XD
It was bad.

I pretended I was a tornado chaser. I’d run around the house in a cape made from a bathroom towel and a chip clip running after imaginary tornadoes. Then, I’d divebomb a couch or bed and yell “pillow factory!”.

Compared to a lot of these responses, many of my childhood games involved no one but myself. I’d go out into the back yard and play survival games, with a compass, matches, or a magnifying glass, and maybe a little food, and act like I was living outdoors. I’d build forts and shelters. Sometimes, me and my sister and a friend would go to our basement and shut off all the lights, and have our dog in the room too. It was impossible to see anything, and we’d wander around on our hands and knees until we found the dog, or each other. The dog seemed best of all, mainly due to his hearing and sense of smell, I imagine. Many of my memorable experiences as a child had a lot to do with being outside. I remember writing in a journal about what I wanted to do when I grew up, and the only thing I wanted was to live in a little house in the forest, and have snowball fights and drink hot chocolate… not much has changed today.

I remember one time when my friends in school convinced me to go to a summer camp, a Christian summer camp. I was raised secular and had no idea what was in store for me. When I got there, my friend Mike and I sat through the hours of boring sermons and chapel, and everything else Christian. One day we decided not to show up, and that we wanted to go home, so we got our backpacks, threw them in a canoe, and rowed off in search of a connection to a river. We even portaged the canoe a few times, and found more water to continue in, but we never made it to the actual river. By the time we got back that night, the counselors hadn’t even noticed that we left.

Me and my best friend came up with this game…he called it “Hohoho and a Buffalo Roam!” and basically we would get in a swing except sitting on our knees and try to swing for as long and as high as possible

There was another one. We had this squiggly curved yellow balance bar in the playground at school, and we would gather the whole gang of kids up and split ourselves in two groups and form 2 lines at both ends. Then we would each pick our favorite action character from like dragon ball z or something and then we would fight each other on the balance bar. The 1 who falls off loses. :D

I’m convinced I invented it, probably not, but it was a certain move on the twirling bars. Those ones that were always right next to each other, one a little higher than the next.

My move was getting the to the bar waist-high, get some momentum by swaying my legs front to back, quickly grabbing behind my knees and turning around the bar. Hurt like HELL!! I think I called it the StomAcher Maker.

Let’s see. I was the oldest of the neighborhood kids (except for two much older girls who scorned to acknowledge us), and making up games was my job. They would all come to my house and call for me and ask “What should we do?” And I would tell them. So I usually got the cool parts. Here are some games we played.

Detective. We would run around the neighborhood looking for clues and writing them down. And then we would try to solve mysteries. This involved a lot of sneaking through back yards and climbing over fences.

King Arthur and his knights. I was King Arthur. We wore armor and had wars. It seems to me that a lot of metal curtain rods failed to hold up curtains any more after they’d been used for swordplay. Also my mother’s silk scarves got used for capes.

Rabbits. For some reason the other kids obeyed when I told them to crawl around on the lawn and nibble grass. They had to because I was the rabbit trainer.

Lion tamer. A variant of Rabbits that involved less grass eating and more growling. This one was great because it began by sneaking into the yard of the lady who had a huge weeping willow out front. We had to steal a branch and strip it to make a whip. The lady always yelled at us. Need I mention who was the lion tamer?

Circus. We did everything Ringling Brothers did, including charge admission. I distinctly remember being the ringmaster and also the tight rope walker.

Doctor. This worked only when there was a refrigerator box . People had to go in the box and stick their bare bottom out a hole in the side to get a shot. My mother interrupted this one and dismantled the box, terminating my medical career.

There were dozens more, some very elaborate, with special constructions, language, costumes, props, etc., and some just an excuse to run around and scream.

@Jeruba Being the oldest really had it’s perks, didn’t it? I was the oldest out of my group as well. They were cows, not rabbits, though.

I played chess sideways from corner to corner

I don’t remember and silly games but I used to make up my own languages and script.

As a kid my brother and I would play tarzan and jane (not romantic version). We loved to climb trees and we even found a back yard that you could only enter by climbing down a tree to get into it. It was abandoned so we would pretend it was a jungle and we were running away and hiding from the bad guys.
Oh another game was wetting huge wads of toilet paper and throwing them into the kitchen windows of our friends. If we could get it actually pass the window into the house we won that battle. Needless to say our parents didn’t like the games but we never told on our friends.
There were other games but most of them I feel was something our dad taught us.

We invented a Frisbee game called ‘Precision’. An area about the size of a tennis court without the net was an ideal playing field and the fencing helped prevent the Frisbee from straying off of the court. In the center of the court was a small round concrete landscaping pillar about 15 inches tall with a square 3’ by 3’ square drawn around it. There were three additional 3’ by 3’ squares placed evenly from left to right in front of each end zone. You had to stand behind the serving line at each end zone and skip the Frisbee on the ground inside the square around the center pillar without hitting the pillar itself and land it in one of the three squares in the opposite end zone. If you skipped the Frisbee and landed it in one of the three end zone boxes, you earned five points for the two outer squares and twenty points for the center box. However, if you could successfully bounce the Frisbee off of the pillar and still land it within one of the end-zone squares, you doubled your points for that particular throw. First one to reach one hundred points was the winner. You can play as many or as few matches as you like. Our games frequently went until way after dark.

I invented ‘Whitewater Barbi’ lololol

Used to tie strings around my naked barbis and watch them body surf the rapids in a nearby fast running small river! hahahahaha

We played dodge ball on bikes. We used a regulation basketball for the dodge ball. I learned that a basket ball will send a bike off both wheels at the same time with little or no damage to the ball.

There was a creek in a park near my house and my freinds and I would spend hours on end there, it was like a jungle with bamboos hanging over the water and a dense overgrown shoreline.

We would have Barbi campouts and tie a long string to our Barbi’s and send them swimming in the rushing water. lol

The birth of ’ Whitewater Barbi.’ hahaha

Its not really a game, but when me and my brother were in the car and it was raining we would count the “mermaids” (raindrops) that were flying by us on the window.

My friend invented “The Box Game” everyone in my class would shuffle into a four square box and we would see who could stay inside it the longest. We also had a huge hill of snow by our school and we would run across it and slide down it.

we are rock stars who sang, ala Love American Style and Partridge Family, was my fave game!! we loved to sing “yummy I got love in my tummy”!!