Category Archives: Skully

I remember playing “skelly”…

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I remember playing “skelly” in Brooklyn (East NY) during the mid/late 60s. We were fortunate enough to have severaly skelly boards permamently painted in the playground. We also used melted crayons to add the weight. A couple of years ago, I introduced my daughters to the game. I drew a board w/ chalk on the back patio. Although, I found it difficult to get down on my knees for each shot (whew!) – I enjoyed playing the games w/ my kids again.

My daughter was doing a…

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My daughter was doing a school project comparing what I did in middle school to what she does. One of the questions was what did I do for fun. Skully was the first thing that came to mind. I’m from Brooklyn and now live in Maryland so my daughter looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to describe the game to her but I was alittle fuzzy so I looked it up online. A couple of things I noticed right away were the board and the scully cap. Every block in my neighborhood had a perminant board about 6′ x 6′ or so dug into the tar of the street, no chalk to get washed away, I want to say we used a screwdriver to accomplish this. Our caps were also filled with tar from the street that we dug out with the screwdriver. This was best done on hot days so the tar was softer. I see alot of refernces to sidewalk game, again everyone I knew played it in the street. I did get annoying yelling “car” or if a car’s tire made your piece move, but since the street was our playground we lived with it.

Does anyone remember a game…

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Does anyone remember a game called skelly or skully (I’m getting old) where you flick a bottlecap around a numbered field on the pavement or if lucky a pre-fab one in a playground. The object of the game is to go to all 12 numbers before your opponent whilst beinmg able to knock him out of a box. Remember?

Hugh, We did blast each…

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Hugh, We did blast each other’s caps as far as possible but the only advantage that I recall was the obvious one of making it more difficult for your opponent to reach his immediate destination and of course you did get to take another shot. We had no numbers in the central trapezoids as you noted. As I recall we considered the lines of the trapezoids extending to the corners of the large box surrounbding #13 to be arms of a spider, the skull (13) being the spider’s head (ignorant we were of the 8 leg requirement of Arachnids!) Also there was no consideration of switching caps. Everybody played with their current favorite which was carried around in your pocket at all times. On occasion I saw “casual” players using unweighted caps or even wooden checkers, but they were generally considered to be fools or rookies. Thanks again for a great visit. Jim Mason

Hi Jim, The game…

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Hi Jim, The game I’ve documented is based on 1970s vintage Bronx skully. It has definitely evolved through the years, and the memory of the way you played may be perfectly accurate (though not going backwards is like a day w/o sunshine IMHO–and I couldn’t imagine not hitting another player’s cap to get into the next box). For example, putting numbers in the trapezoids around the 13 box is definitely a Bronx/Harlem thing of the mid/late 60s, and never made it to Queens. And, believe it or not, if you played with 13 boxes, you definitely were higher up on the skully evolutionary cycle–we’ve seen pictures and talked to folk who played with only 9 boxes “back in the day.” There’s really no right answer about the rules–I know for a fact that we had rules on my block that kids 2 blocks away didn’t. Now that I think of it, the “bonus boxes” around “13” were introduced to my block by a kid who moved from another part of the Bronx! Please feel free to try the rules as we have here, or play the way you remember, or take a hybrid of both–just don’t change rules in the middle of the game! -Hugh McNally hmcnally [at] streetplay [dot] com

After reading the rules…

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After reading the rules published by this site I have a couple of other questions/comments. I don’t recall proceeding up and down from 1 to 13 and back again. My memory is once you reached 13 and went out of town you were a killer. I also have no memory of any rules that would allow you to skip boxes in your journey to killer (bonus rules). Is there anyone else out there who played in the late 40’s or early 50’s with similar memories or have I just forgotten? It’s been close to 50 years since my last “competitive” game!

This site has made my day….

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This site has made my day. I played skully avidly in the early 1950’s in the Amsterdam Housing project near Lincoln Center (which didn’t exist at the time). I played with a passion through second grade and then my family moved to New Jersey where new adventures took over. As I recall my dad filled the bottle caps with melted crayon for me in fear that I’d burn the apartments down. I live in New Mexico now and taught it to my daughter. I still have the caps I modified here in the early 80’s. If only I could find some decent competition! Also in the 1980’s I introduced the game to my nieces and nephews in Managua, Nicaragua. I told them it was called it Matador (killer). I can still remember the joy in my young niece’s voice when she made killer, yelling out “MATADOR!”