Category Archives: Skully
Chinese Double-dutch. Any…
Chinese Double-dutch. Any girls remember that? It was played at all the great melting pot schools in the working class areas…which is pretty much Brooklyn personified. My area was Ditmas Junior High (IS 62). And Chinese double-ddutch is a game played with two girls standing on either end, but instead of holding clothes line rope they’re inside of a long chain-link of sturdy rubberbands. The jumper must negotiate complex “Twister-like” contortions with torso and legs and always be able to jump outside of the rubber bands, both legs free and clear.For lunch a big mixture of kids would flock together to varying restaurants to eat anything from Kasha Varnishkas (spelled right?) Pizza, tandoori chicken, egg rolls, canolli… you have it. We even traded bagged lunches. My pastrami for your fried chicken… it always worked out. This was a cultural exchange between the Asian and the African sisters back in the early 70’s, where we found common ground despite the odds. Some of those kids I’ve seen through life in Paris, Frisco, and Miami. It’s a small big world in Brooklyn. PS: I found out the game was Skully, not Skelly… thanks.
Although it’s been many…
Although it’s been many years since NY was my home, I’m originally from the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, but I went to school in Manhattan Beach’s PS 195. My best friend’s name was Randy, and she lived in a mansion with a yacht(I never knew we had them in urban NY), and she had 5 black maids. This amazed me because my grandmother was a black maid. I treated them all with the utmost respect. Randy and I were inseperable and I miss her and wish I could remember her last name. I left 6th grade with a 12.9 grade reading level thanks to my laid-back early 1970’s hippy teachers. That was a great school. In Bed-Stuy we played games like Skelly, where you used the plastic top of a milk jug filled with wax and flushed even by sidewalk scraping. Does anyone remember this game or what a skelly court looked like? I’d like to make one for my son.
Is there anybody who can…
> How do the center numbers…
> How do the center numbers work. Are they for going backwards or what. The numbers in the trapezoids surrounding the “13” box are the “number of boxes bonus” someone gets for hitting the player out who is stuck in that box. So let’s say I’m going for 4 forwards and I hit someone out of the “6” trapezoid, I would then get to stick my cap in the “9” box and go for “10 forward” (I _was_ going for “4”, now I’m going for “10”). > the moderator of the forum (“Masta Blasta”) would frown at such a basic approach This is correct, I frown on this approach of simply losing turns if you get stuck in the skull. It’s called a skull because you’re dead when you’re in it, not simply stunned! Of course, you’re welcome to use the simpler approaches as long as all agree to the rules beforehand. I think there’s more excitement to the “bonus” thing than the “lose turns” approach. Try ’em both, decide for yourself.
God I loved skully when…
The numbers in the middle…
The numbers in the middle can have one of 2 meanings. Either they can be the amount of boxes that someone will advance if they knock you out of the dead zone or they can mean how many turns you lose while in the dead zone. In our neighborhood we didn’t put the numbers in the middle at all but just had the player lose 3 turns if he or she got stuck in the middle. I’m sure the moderator of the forum (“Masta Blasta”) would frown at such a basic approach, however, it worked for us. You might even combine the two (you lose 3 or so turns unless someone knocks you out – and then they get advance x boxes).
i am introducing this game”skully”…
I used to play Skully as…
I used to play Skully as a kid in Queens; there was a board painted on the schoolyard blacktop, but I don’t remember exactly how it was laid out. What I remember most about skully was making the pieces. We used to tie washer magnets onto the end of a piece of string to fish the bottle caps out of old coke bottle vending machines, and then melt broken Crayola crayons into them under high intensity lamps and let them harden in order to give them some weight. A good color pattern was considered cool. :^)
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is skully the same thing as a game we played in astoria, queens which we called “mud”. if anyone knows what mud is (also played with bottlecaps, on the sidewalk where a chalk square was drawn with numbers inside) and if, in fact, it is different from skully i’d appreciate knowing. th