I used to play this in Southern California in the 60’s, when I was 10 or so. It was like hopscotch, except you drew a grid of 9 squares, and started in the lower right square. Each square was labeled. We labeled the first one “girls”, the second one “boys”, the third “fruit”, and so on. All I remember was, we had to jump in a counter- clockwise pattern, name the square, then name an object from that square for the rest. Sounds confusing. Let’s see if I can make it clearer.

First, jump in first square and say “girls, girls”, then seconds square, say “mary, mary”, third square say “jenny, jenny”, etc., until you got to center square, hopefully coming up with 8 girls names. Then you’d start over, but this time, you’d jump in the first square, saying “girls, girls”, then jump in the second square saying “boys, boys”, then proceed to name 7 boys names without repeating. 3rd time around, it would be “girls, girls”, “boys, boys”, “fruit, fruit”, then name 6 fruit as you jumped into the next 6 boxes.

Does anyone out there remember this game? I’ve been racking my brain to remember more of it, what the labels on the other boxes were, and whether you had to throw a stone into the boxes or anything. I played this with my cousins, whose parents were German, so maybe it’s from Germany. No one at school played this. I’d love to find the rules for it on line, or in a book, but everywhere I look for hopscotch games, it’s nowhere to be found. And, I don’t have a clue as to whether it has a name or not.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.