To distract us from the potential for a cats v. baseball civil war, I'll ofer this up. My (ex) minion does a weekly question to her mailing list, and collects all the answers. This week's was fun.

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What games did you enjoy as a child?

with family and babysitters (that is, older people), board games and card games. beginning with candyland and war, graduating to scrabble and gin (both the game and the beverage). somewhere in between, my mom taught me to play solitaire. it was the closest thing to meditation she knew.

with my brother, outdoor boy stuff, handball, hot lava, frisbee.

with my childhood girl friends, imaginary and fantasy games, usually around being older ("let's play teenagers"). there were four of us and we would pretend to be unsupervised girls between 14 and 17, very cool, very sexy, very grown up. my best friend and i also had a pretty directly homoerotic variation for when we were alone in which i played a boy and we were neighbors.

halfway through my freshman year of college, i got kicked out of school for all kinds of out of control, self-destructive behavior. i went back home full of shame and scars while my family tried to decide whether or not to have me committed. my mother took a week off to stay home and be with me, but we couldn't bear to speak to each other. once i could drag myself out of bed, we spent several days sitting at the corner of our kitchen table playing solitaire. she would play a game, then collect the cards and hand them to me, i would shuffle and play my own game, then collect the cards and hnd them back to her. i think we did this for four days without exchanging four words. it was eerie, and a strange start to our healing. it did not feel like a game.

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I grew up in a world where kids could play outdoors more than in so our favorite games were in the yard. (Pong came along when I was nearly in high school.) Some games: Red Light / Green Light, Frozen Statue, Cup Ball, and a game we played called (for some strange reason) Godzilla in which we would play around the front yard just after dark and wait for a rare car to turn the corner. We would shout "Godzilla!" and try to hide before getting caught in the headlights. If the light hit you, you were history.

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candy land, stratego, life, monopoly, scrabble, casino(a card game) and my favorite that I still occasionally play: dress up

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We played a game called, "Jail break", with neighboring developments. Great fun!!

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my favorite game was the game of life, the actual board game. that shit made you think! hungry hungry hippos, though i never had one... id like to see how active the kids were in the commercial, bumping up and down and shit. snoopy snow cone machine - not a game but fun anyway. didnt have this either but looked cool. any outside game that i could play with others as long as possible as i am an only child...

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My mom was big on playing games with me so we played them all: Life, Sorry, Uno, Monopoly, Cards, Operation, Concentration, Whatever there was, we played it.

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Johnny Lightning. I'm a female, and this was a thrilling game for me to get at Christmas. All it was was a racetrack with two cars, and their speed was determined how fast you could push them through the starting gate. No electricity was involved at all. In hindsight, I can see how that this wasn't the typical toy you'd buy for a daughter (I was also an only child), so I think my dad bought it for himself. :) But I simply loved it. I always liked the boys toys more--the were interactive and simply more fun.

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chase, truth or dare, spin the bottle, tv tag, football (which ended promptly the moment the boys realized I was a GIRL).

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On the playground, boxball (aka, foursquare) was fiercely competitive and the scene of one of my great elementary school triumphs when I held serve through a line of twenty. In my neighborhood, all the houses had backyards that empted into a large common space with trees all around. Prime (continued...)

( continues...) for hide and go seek which could go on for hours. Also, lots of tree climbing - though that wasn't exactly a game. At the youth center I became a master of bumper pool, ping pong, and foosball. Organized sports - baseball baseball baseball. Love it still (even though my 8 y.o. son broke his nose at baseball practice this week). Board games: The Game of Life, Stratego, Monopoly. Cards - War, Spit, Gin and then later, Casino. In South Florida, the ever present coral rock doubled as chalk, so you could always do hopscotch when you got bored. Or you'd go invent some new game with a tennis ball and a carport wall.

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I loved night time games of hide and seek and tag with my siblings. I was raised on a farm and daytime was devoted to chores...working the fields and caring for animals and deep shadows and the way the moon and stars lit up the world. 40 yrs later and I still love dusk and early evening.

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Army Man. The boys in the neighborhood would split into two armies, station themselves at opposite ends of the block, then slowly advance upon one another in an effort to vanquish their foe. Using two-car garages and olive trees as cover, hopping over backyard fences and dashing across residential streets in order to gain better position, the soldiers would keep a keen eye on whichever of their teammates had been appointed Sarge, who would wave his arm cautiously in the air to bring his troops stealthily forward. Those of us who didn't have toy rifles used baseball bats to shoot the Japs and the Krauts, as we so freely referred to the enemies our Dads fought in WW II (even as the opposing army referred to us in the same way). You had to "die" (usually in a fairly dramatic way) if an enemy soldier quite obviously caught you in his crosshairs. However there were no winners. The game ended when a majority of us battle-hardened G.I.'s had been called home to supper by their impatient mothers.

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Twister, Parcheesi, Gin Rummy, Crazy Eights, Russian Bank, Othello, Mastermind,Connect Four, Solataire, Volley Ball, Wiffle Ball

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Four square, kick the can, sardines, hardball, tree climbing, dressing up, dressing up the dog. We had an amazing rope swing that we would jump onto the seat from the wall of our tree fort. Huge swing, could kick off the wall and keep it going forever. I also remember playing War. There were several venues for this ever fascinating adventure. One involved the "jungle" of a neighbor's back yard, lots of slithering on elbows and hiding out. The other involved running as fast as possible away from someone, getting "shot" in the back and doing a dramatic throwing oneself forward, arms outstretched landing face down in the field or wherever. (Vietnam, remember?) I also really liked riding dirtbikes. We had very little supervision and so got to run amok a lot of the time. I'm glad I was a kid then and not now!

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Anything electronic. I had a game called Fabulous Fred (or Freddie), it was like a Simon Says kinda game with colors and numbers. But Simon Says was only 4 big buttons which paled in comparison to Fabulous Fred¹s NINE buttons! Wow that was my favorite game EVER......

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Stoopball, flipping baseball cards, ringoleevio, freeze tag, TV tag, football, stickball, punchball, kickball, boxball, knux, spit, parchesi, stratego, kick the can, giant step, bombardment, jacks, tetherball, ultimate frisbee, volleyball, duck duck goose, monopoly, operation, sorry!, don't break the ice, triominos, master mind, battleship, candyland, chutes and ladders, hula hoops, coleco football, three-legged race, potato sack race, bobbing for apples, spud, asses up.

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I was very fond of nerf tag football. I also very much liked the cardboard Olympics. We'd break down boxes and slide down steep yards with them as if we were in stiff competition from the rest of America and the surrounding world.

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Oh this is fun! I liked Chutes & Ladders, Connect 4, the three legged race & bean bag toss (field day games); and I HATED with a (continued...)

( continues...) passion, DODGE BALL ( also known as Bullies From Hell )

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And mine...

For me, there's a big difference between the games I played and the games I enjoyed. When we lived in Vermont, and ours was the largest open and most centrally located lawn in the neighborhood, we'd play all kinds of things in the summer. I liked red rover, duck-duck goose. At our next door neighbor's house, which one could easily run all the way around, we played a game called The Bears Are Out tonight. I particularly liked this game. The person who was "it" was the bear and we would all run around the house. When one of us was tagged, we would become a bear. Home/safety was the jungle gym. And a team of people could form a human chain of safety to save a trapped player from being tagged. I also loved playing poison floor in the room I shared with my sister. The idea was you had to get around the room without touching the floor. If you touched the "poison floor" you were out/dead. That same neighbor's mother used to send her kids out to the yard to stare away the clouds if it looked like it would rain. I don't know if she really thought this would work; but I am sure she got all of the little ones out from underfoot while she cooked.

In our first house in Maryland, I played a lot of pool. We had a small, kid-sized pool table, purchased as the Christmas game (we'd get a different game every year). I spent a lot of time at the pool table and got to be quite good. At one point, I think I could beat everyone in my family. Later in life, my Godfather and I would play. He'd coach me about pool and life and I'd get out some good competitive energy and tell him about whatever guy I was infatuated with. He eventually gave me an instructive book about billiards and I would take it to the pool hall and set up combination shots, etc. I got quite good.

I still love to play pool, but was distressed Friday night when I did quite badly. Though my partner and I did finally win one, it wasn't without some charity on the part of our opponents.

Whoa, that was long.

cats v. baseball civil war

I like both. I'm Maryland!

I like both. I'm Maryland!

Yeah, what kind of games did Maryland play growing up?

Hey David, thanks for the heads up on that Chron story. I had not yet seen it.

Don't know if this counts as game, but rarely did a week go by where our fridge didn't have Han Solo serving time in it.

but rarely did a week go by where our fridge didn't have Han Solo serving time in it.

So you prefer your heroes immobolized in carbonite, eh?

::takes all kinds of notes::

Yeah, sure. Keeps them from running away until I finish. God, I'd have to go to so many meetings if I said that anywhere but here...you have no idea.