Category Archives: Other Games

Hey, Loved playing Cracktop…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: Frank [e-mail]
 

Hey, Loved playing Cracktop as a kid growing up in the Ravenswood projects on 21 st. and 35 ave. in Astoria It involved the use of small wooden tops. We would get in a circle and spin all of our tops at the same time. The first top to come to a stop on it’s side was the top that was put in the middle of our circle. Then each of us in turn would try to “Crack” the top in the middle by hitting it with our top as hard as we could as we threw it to spin it. If you hit the top in the middle on your throw and your top kept spinning, you were good till next turn. If you hit the top or missed and your top did not spin, it was your turn in the middle. But if you missed the top in the middle, as your top was spinning you could pick it up in the palm of your hand ( the top had to remain spinning all the while ) and drop it on the top in the middle, if yours kept spinning after that, you were good to go. We had hours of fun playing this game and we became quite adept at hitting and even Cracking the tops in the middle. We would show off the Paint of other tops that would rub off on ours after hitting them. We also had a name for hitting the top in the middle. I have no freakin idea where it came from, but we called it a ” Kosky ” LOL I have no clue what that means, but when we hit the top in the middle it was called a Kosky! Hope this brings back some good memories, it does for me.

I am translating a short…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: cynthia
 

I am translating a short story from Argentina in which various games of marbles are played, and I’m trying to find English equivalents for the names of these games. One of them is played like jacks, but with marbles. In another, you shoot marbles at a wall, and whoever gets their marbles closest to the wall wins. Anybody know? Thanks!

Back in Overbrook in the…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: Ed Cunningham
 

Back in Overbrook in the late fifties and early sixties, we used to play “tape ball.” We’d get some masking tape, wrap it into a baseball shape, and play with it that way. You’d pitch it like a baseball, since obviously it didn’t bounce, and if you caught it well with your stick, it would really fly! The ultimate example of creative use of materials at hand…

Hi I would like to…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: c.christall [e-mail]
 

Hi I would like to find out about any marble shows in our four states area. Ar. Tx. Ok. La. or somewhere in the neiborhood. You can e-mail me at. (} Thanks C.Christall

Bottle cap art. When I was…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: JACKAH
 

Bottle cap art. When I was younger, twist-off caps were just starting to be seen but no skelsie player would ever be caught dead using one. They were too, light, tall, whatever. They just weren’t used. Crimp-crown caps were the cap of choice. If fact, caps with a cork liner were prefered to those with the new-fangled plastic liner. The cork liner had to be dug out with a can opener or screw driver. If you were good (lucky) the liner would come out in one piece. The cap was then delicatly balanced on the burner of your stove (I think I was in my twenties before I saw an electric stove) and heated. Various pieces of wax crayons (Crayola, anything else was crap) were then added and allowed to melt. The skill was in selecting and mixing the colors to arrive at an eyepleasing design, something like a spin-art picture. Crayon added near the end remained the most vivid but the best caps were made by letting the melted crayon boil and convex. The cap was then taken off the heat and floated in a shallow pan of water to set the design. If the cap sunk you were left with a 3-D wax sculpture, pretty to look at but not playable. About two thirds of the time the colors would just run together. The resulting cap would be fine for playing but not much to look at. Every once in a while, though, you’d get a real work of art.

I learned to play Ringeleavio…

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: Linda Natanagara
 

I learned to play Ringeleavio while on vacation in the Adirondacks and brought it back to my neighborhood in MIddletown, NJ. We only played Hide and Seek between a few houses, but Ringaleavio took up the whole neighborhood. We only played it at night and I remember being soaked with sweat from all the running.

ollie ollie oxen free …

Streetplay Discussion Archive Posted on by
Original author: your mother
 

ollie ollie oxen free Dave Schreiber writes: What’s the meaning and origin of the phrase “ollie ollie oxen free”? I occasionally hear references to it as a phrase spoken by children, but I never used it or heard it when I was growing up (I was born in 1971 and grew up in San Jose, California). Ollie ollie oxen free is one of about a bajillion variants (I know–I counted) of a phrase used in various children’s games. As we have seen, children’s language and folklore hasn’t been as thoroughly studied as one would like, but in this case, researchers have tracked down a huge number of forms. The phrase is used in a variety of children’s chasing games, especially hide-and-(go-)seek. The rough form of this game is that a player (called “it”) gives other players a chance to hide, and then tries to find them. When “it” finds the first hider, he calls out some phrase indicating that the other players are “safe” to return “home,” at which point the person “it” found will succeed him as “it.” The original form of the phrase was something like all in free or all’s out come in free, both standing for something like all who are out can come in free. These phrases got modified to all-ee all-ee (all) in free or all-ee all-ee out(s) in free; the -ee is added, and the all is repeated, for audibility and rhythm. From here the number of variants takes off, and we start seeing folk etymologies in various forms. The most common of these has oxen replacing out(s) in, giving all-ee all-ee oxen free; with the all-ee reinterpreted as the name Ollie, we arrive at your phrase, which, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, is especially common in California. Norwegian settlement areas have Ole Ole Olsen’s free. For the out(s) in phrase, we also see ocean, oxford, ax in, awk in, and even oops all in. This multiplicity of examples demonstrates the unsurprising fact that young children often have little idea what phrases like this mean, and transmute them into variants that involve more familiar terms, losing the original meaning in the process. It’s difficult to determine early dates for these expressions–most of them weren’t collected until the 1950s and later–but based on recollections of the games, it seems that they were in common use by the 1920s, and probably earlier (home free is found in print in the 1890s, and the game hide-and-seek is at least four centuries old).