Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- The Games Your Family Played

It's Saturday Night -

time for more Genealogy Fun!

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has our assignment for this week:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1)  Think about the games that your whole family would play when you were a child.

2)  Tell us about one (or more) of them - what was it called, what were the rules (as you remember them), who played the game, where did you play the game, who usually won?

3)  Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.

Here is mine:

We loved playing games when I was growing up. We had many board games in our hall closet such as Cootie, Mr. Potato Head, Candyland, and Chutes and Ladders when we were young. As we got older, we played Clue, Monopoly, and Life. We even had Risk, but no one knew how to play, so we made up rules to play with the game pieces on the big map.

Other games we played were card games. I know we played Old Maid, Go Fish, War, Rummy, Crazy Eights, and Solitaire. My mom taught me to play double solitaire and gin rummy, too. My dad liked playing dice games, such as Liars Dice and Yahtzee.

I love word games, so my mother played a word grid game with us. We would put categories on one side of the grid and choose letters randomly from a magazine article for the other axis. We then had five or ten minutes to fill the grid. Each box in the category had to start with that letter. If two people had the same item, it was crossed out. We never had a name for this game, but I think one can buy Scattergories which is very similar to our game. But ours was free. All you needed was a pencil and a piece of paper! 

Sample playing grid

Outside games included jump rope, jacks, tag, and hide ‘n’ seek. Because we lived in a rural-like road, there were really great places to hide! An empty field up the street was great for ball games except when the ball went over the freeway fence.

I don’t think today’s children have as much fun with games as we did. Families are smaller and rarely are children allowed to have the run of the neighborhood unsupervised. Then, there’s video games…fine for playing alone, but we always had such fun playing in groups.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.