Top 12 really weird children’s games of the past, they didn’t really play football
If today children play Pokémon, consoles, toy cars or in very unhealthy playgrounds, we cannot really say that this was the case for children of previous centuries. Since there were no toy stores we had a little fun with what we had, and sometimes all we had was a rusty scythe, the arm of a dead man found by earth and the bubonic plague?; that limited the fun a bit. We therefore suggest that you see some examples of children’s games from the past that were a little strange, to tell yourself that our time is not so bad after all.
1. The bell game
It’s pretty basic: you put a lot of players on a field, you blindfold them and you only leave one player’s eyes free by giving him a bell. When the player rings the bell the others must rush to catch him before he moves. You can imagine that it was a completely stupid game where there were regularly injuries and children with concussions, some of the shocks were so violent.
2. The dumbest game in the world where you have to kick someone’s ass
Called in English the “hot cockles” this game for children and young adults consisted in blindfolding a player and making him kneel down by laying his head on the knees of another player. Then, the other participants had to come and kick his ass until he guessed who had just smashed his ass. Both inventive and painful, two epithets that fit well with my marriage (we did that in a disused sawmill).
3. Mr Punch puppet shows
You must see the cliché of old-fashioned puppet shows, well in England there was the very creepy character of Mr Punch. And as much to tell you that in terms of antiheroes, we are far from the image of the slightly nice villain: historically, he killed his wife, hanged the policeman who was to arrest him for his crime, threw a baby by the window, faked his own death and was finally picked up by the devil himself who beat him to death, all in front of the laughing eyes of the children of the time. And then it’s going to yell saying that manga is violent.
4. The game of marriage and divorce
The children had fun playing the game of marriage and divorce in the somewhat wealthy families of Victorian England: young girls and young boys were separated and lined up on each side of the room, then each person had to read a short introduction and the person of the opposite sex who was on his level in the other line had to say whether they wanted to marry or divorce the one who had just introduced themselves. But in the end, it was a judge who made the decision and you could well find yourself married with someone you did not want at all. A very embarrassing kind of forced speed-dating.
5. Ossicles
If we take a closer look, we just gave the kids small animal bones that we had just killed so that they had fun by throwing them on the ground (well the rules are a little more complex than that) which comes down to to say that we let the children have fun with pieces of corpses. There’s more fun in life.
6. Le jeu “Ring around the rosies”
The goal of this English “game” is to make a big circle while dancing around someone and swap places. So far nothing to scratch your ass with a cheese grater you will tell me, but it is the words of the song that the kids sing that freaks out a bit and for good reason it refers to the plague epidemic black. “Ring around the rosies” means “turn around the roses” or people who had pink / red patches that could give the plague. The sequel is “pocket full of posies” or “the pockets full of flowers” which were the plants that were spun to the sick and which were supposed to bring luck. And at the end the kids just yell “ashes, ashes” which are the ashes of the bodies we were burning. Nice huh?
7. Dead Child’s Play (Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board)
In English, the name of this game could be translated as “Light as a feather, rigid as a board”. The goal is for one child to play dead while the others lift him off the ground with their fingertips without the “dead” moving. The origin of the trick comes to us once again from the good old days when the plague was raging, and I dare not really imagine how kids had the idea to invent such a game.
8. Stick and wheel game
This game, which can be played both alone and with others, consists of pushing a wooden wheel as far and as long as possible with a stick without it falling. If the kids did it to race, basically it was a training session for Roman soldiers where you had to count the number of stick strokes you managed to throw at the wheel before it fell. Overall we had to be pissed off at that time, luckily we died young.
9. The ball of yarn game
Without being fundamentally strange, the ball of yarn game looked especially boring: you had to sit at a table and try to throw a ball of yarn over an opponent sitting on the other side and who had to block it before sending it back. A kind of handball but seated, which must have been much more fun with alcohol, like a good old beer pong.
10. The Funeral Game
As the name suggests, this 19th century game was all about playing a funeral. The kids gathered around a doll or a particular thing and held a vigil, sometimes even going so far as to bury their fake dead. The really sad thing behind all this is that infant mortality being high at that time, it was probably everyday life that had inspired such a game for kids.
11. The Honey Pot Game
The game is as stupid as its name: a child sits in a potty or gives the impression that he is sitting in a potty and the others have to carry him as far as possible as if they came back from shopping while carrying a huge jar of honey. So. Frankly it’s not to say but we still know how to laugh better in our time.
12. Bonus : and Baseball
Ok it’s not particularly an old game calm down. But on the one hand it’s a bit old game and on the other hand it’s a weird game but it is above all the sport that causes the most deaths and accidents among children. Each year in the United States there are nearly 110,000 children who go to the emergency room because of the sport (not to mention the number of deaths). The reason ? Injuries from super hard balls or wooden bats that can smash your skull.