When I have offspring they shall not play the banal form of concentration that most of us played when we were knee high to a grasshopper. They shall play Set. This is a matching game that gives your brain a serious workout. A set is determined by grouping three cards according to four different categories and by similarity or difference. Wha-? Read the rules. Play the daily online puzzle.
Games I played as a child:
War: This consisted of finding a stick that was vaguely gun shaped, jumping over and hiding behind logs, covering myself with dirt and hiding under the riverbank, all the while shooting imaginary enemies and fighting a little hand to hand combat. This was played alone.
Black Op: This is just like War except I followed my dog the whole time because we were on some sort of secret mission where my dog knew where to go.
Cold War: On the off chance that a neighbor kid wanted to play with me, we would play Cold War by stockpiling as many walnuts as possible. Gigantic piles of walnuts. Hundreds of walnuts. Then we’d throw them at each other. This game became somewhat adapted in high school when we used bottle rockets as ICBMs.
Thunderdome: This game is played by catching as many crawdads as possible and then making them fight each other. The one that survives the longest gets dropped off the bridge on the golf course.
Pirate: My poor, poor cat.
Monkey: This game was played under the tree by the ravine, most of the roots were exposed and long and tough enough to swing upon. This is the best way to get as dirty as possible in the shortest amount of time.
House: Yes, I played House. STFU.
Farm: Being a farm kid, I had tons of little tractors that I’d play with in a sandbox.
Not having a creek with crawdads my version of thunderdome was more of a crash ’em up derby where my brother and I would create our warrior’s out of legos and then smash them together until one broke apart. Last one standing wins. Our bucket of legos were pretty well trashed by the time we outgrew that one.
The lamest game I ever played when I was little was Banker. Yes, Banker.
Me and my friend Annie would take out all the monopoly money. One person would be designated Banker and the other person would be the Customer. The game consisted of making monetary transactions.
I still have no idea why we thought this was fun.
We played banker, too.
We also used to play school all the time. No one ever learned anything. I don’t know why we spent our summers pretending that it was fall and that we were back in the classroom. I guess it is because we had a chalkboard and didn’t know what else to do with it.
Also when I was little, instead of setting up a lemonade stand on the streetcorner, we used to set up a face-painting stand. We’d sit out there for hours with our little table and our little washable tempura paints and paintbrushes, trying to coerce pedestrians and people in cars to stop and get their faces painted.
Needless to say, we never made much money.
By the time I was 5 I beat my whole family at Memory (the brand named version of concentration). It pissed off my brother, who was 12 at the time.