As I outlined in the last post, I was obsessed with sports cards growing up. I was lucky enough to have a brother and a few friends who were card nuts too. Here are a few games we played with our cards when we were kids...
1. Knock Down the Leaner
An oldie, but goodie, this led to ALL of my childhood commons having bent and dinged corners. For those of you who are not old fogies, here's how it went. One card is set against a wall, this is the 'leaner'. Then the contestants step back a ways (we used 15 feet) and take turns flipping other cards at the leaner in an attempt to knock it down. We found that the sideways wrist flip was the most effective throw. We always had a 'pot' of cards that the winner got. A gentlemen's game of skill! When sportsflics came out, we banned them, mostly because we were putting holes in the leaner. And the walls.
There are variations to this game, like' set up the leaner', where you try to get your throw card to stand up against the wall.
2. Poker
Pretty self explanatory. No cash, just cards. This was pretty fun, but there was always that one goober who wanted to put 10 commons in the pot, insisting that the book value was the same as the bid. Might be my first negative experience with book value.
3. Hoops - I'll give you...
This was mostly when we could get a sucker to come around. We'd announce the 'trick' basketball shot we were going to try and ask the sucker what they would give us if we made it. Like this: "I'm going to throw the ball off the backboard, catch it in the air and throw it in from under my leg. Bank." The sucker (usually with a little prodding) would offer a 1989 Topps Griffey Jr. or something. Then we'd make the shot if we could.
I'm a little mystified that we could get people to give us cards for this. Often it was just me and my brother taking turns being the sucker, but there were many times that we'd get a neighborhood kid to stick around long enough to get some nice stuff.
Anyone else play games with/for cards growing up????
we played leaner up against the gym wall for sure....
ReplyDeleteanother game we played was Scramble. When someone had a stack of doubles they didn't want, they stood about 7 or 8 steps up and yelled Scramble. Then, one card at a time, he'd wrist flick the cards into the teeming mass below. Whomever came up with the card kept it. Needless to say, this was not a good way at acquiring mint condition cards.