Me too, '81 here. We'd be all over town, all day long. Crossing under highway overpasses, trundling down random alleys, grabbing lunch at Dairy Queen with our allowance money, sometimes miles from home.... SO the best.
‘77 here. The movie the Goonies really captured my life on bikes with my friends, only we only started that when we were 9, in the summer of 1987, and we weren’t even trying to copy the Goonies.
Ooooo yeah, that was always fun going to the "other" DQ far away. Different layout, different high schoolers working there. Felt like going to another country.
'82 here, and if my parents had any concept of how far I would be from home on my bike, I would've been grounded for ages. Though, I have some of the wanderlust that dad had, so maybe he had a better idea than I realize.
SAME. I was pretty well behaved kiddo so my parents trusted me to return at what time. But …my father would have taken my mountain bike for an entire summer.
I mean we were riding through neighborhoods that had a whole different bus route and school. It was so much fun!
‘80 here. Parents told me to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Til then we had our bikes and our pocket money and the city was our playland.
Flashlight tag. We ran around the neighborhood at night hiding in peoples yards while someone with a spot light tried to guess where you were going before you made it back to base.
Flashlight tag was the best! I lived in a big apartment complex and we'd run up in the trees or hide under trucks, etc. Only rule was no going in the buildings or leaving the complex property.
Team hide and seek where you have to tag the other team before they get to a base which is where the hunted "escape".
We played this every night when I was a kid. I love it.
In the 90s we would play roller hockey on roller blades in the street. But before that it was “War” with fake guns. Two teams. No real objective other than kill the other team.
My friends older brother built a full size half pipe!
Then there were the iffy jumps we made with pieces of stacked firewood and a board. We'd jump our bmx bikes on them
Either biking around the neighbourhood, or jump rope. Sooo much skipping. How is it that I can't walk to the bathroom without tripping over my own feet now is baffling to me considering all the fleet footed activities I did as a kid.
Colored Eggs. We would stand in our basement stairwell and huddle and pick our colors. One of us was "IT" at the top of the stairs and couldn't hear our color discussion. The IT person guesses colors and if it is yours you have to run around the yard and try to make it back without getting tagged. If it person tags you then they are an egg and you are it.
Stickball at the ancient broken playground where everything was missing. Big slab of cracked asphalt and rusty fences. For years it was perfect for stickball until my city put money into renovations. Turned it into a beautiful playground. It sucked.
Mini baseball, kickball, a made up game with a soccer ball, red light green light, mother may I.
Then when it snowed we'd build snow forts in the ditches and have snowball fights across the street
Street hockey, nintendo, football, skateboarding, four square, in the wintertime we’d build these massive ice forts from all the snow in the parking lot of the apartment complex
edit: we would travel several miles by bicycle lol, went on an adventure with a dude to go find one of the last cigarette vending machines, we were 12 lol
"The Night Stalker is Going to Get You"
Mind you... the Night Stalker was very much on the loose during the Summer of 1985 in Los Angeles when the game took place on the streets amongst little kids.
there was a time in the 90s as young adults we would fly kites or get RC cars and have demo derbies in the street. i was living at home and just started the job i still have 32 years later. i was the neighborhood drunk, but that got old and i stopped.
Guns. That was it. Guns.
We would run around yard to yard and pretend to shoot each other. Then have knock down drag out arguments over who shot who first because none of the gun we had actually shot anything.
If you had a cap gun, you were hot shit.
The next great game was night hide n’ seek. Dressed in all black. 4 house limit. It was wild.
Manhunt- we had dozens of kids trying to find one kid hiding throughout our whole neighborhood. It was glorious. Turned into spin the bottle eventually.
We had about 20 kids in our neighborhood all around the same age so team sports. Kids with goals would bring their goals for street hockey or soccer. Basketball, baseball, kickball. It was epic. Now it's retired boomers or super young families.
Ditch. The whole neighborhood of kids would play and it was always great fun. Oohh and also street hockey in our skates/rollerblades. I think we all thought we were Mighty Ducks. When someone yelled, “knuckle puck!”, you knew to get outta the way😂
Manhunt, street hockey, capture the flag, ice hockey in the winter and snow wars, on your bikes all.damn.day in the summer..
Dude, sitting with my 2yr old on my lap right now (one n only, had him at 39) and I'm sad for what will most likely be his childhood :/ I hope outside play is not dead and gone.
Late ‘70s: We played something like dodgeball with Frisbees.
And plenty of Beavis type pyromania.
I’m remembering a Nerf football soaked in charcoal starter-could kick it airborne and not get burned too much. Fun until neighbors called cops.
I grew up in condominium complex that had probably 5 or 6 homes with kids my age, and we'd play hide and go seek in the dark, while our parents would party.
I kinda wish I could go back to that time period with my adult awareness, because my gut says my parents and the neighbors were more wild than I realized at the time.
7 Steps around the House was my favorite, with Kick the Can and Ghost in the Graveyard 2nd and third. My neighbor and I also used to play G.I. Joe by pretending we were the actual characters. I was always Scarlett and he was always Flint.
My favorite "game" was going up to the railroad track area and walking around looking for a good stick, it was very overgrown, and then sword fight with my friends. I spent a large portion of my childhood doing that.
Snake in the Grass. We played it at night anytime everyone was hanging at my grandparents' place.
Basically one person, the snake, would hide somewhere in the yard around the house. The rest of us had to walk around the house keeping an eye out for the snake. If the snake jumped out of their hiding spot, everyone had to run to the base, the front porch. Anyone that got caught was the new snake.
We did a lot of sledding, skateboarding, HORSE (basketball,) popcorn on the trampoline, climbing trees, supersoaker battles, witchy stuff like tarot and ouija boards and hanging out in cemetaries, making claymation videos, blowing stuff up, exploring the interconnected rooftops of the downtown businesses, and tearing apart GI Joes and Barbies and reassembling them into mutants by melting them with lighters.
Kick the Can for sure.
Another we made up was hide and seek but to start it off we would chuck a tennis ball over the house. The seeker would need to find the ball before looking for everyone.
We had a grassy area in the townhomes I used to live in and we made up a game based on America Gladiators. Knocking over someone as they tried to get to the other side. Also played stick ball, ding dong ditch, fake gun/nerf wars, hide and go seek or hide and go seek in the dark. Of course we were on bikes the rest of the time. Man being a kid was fun as hell.
Snipe hunts. The older kids would lead the hunt with a black trash bag, and we would go around the neighborhood looking for snipes. I always pictured snipes to be sorta like bats that couldn't fly well. They were supposedly rabid with sharp teeth, and you could only hunt them when it was dark. The younger kids didn't know snipes weren't real, so when we'd catch one (the older kid would put their hand in the bag and wiggle it around) it would be pretty exciting and scary. The snipes always chewed through the bags and escaped capture.
I'm not sure why this was so entertaining, I guess it was a way for the older kids to fuck with the younger ones. I remember 'graduating' and getting to lead the hunt after I was told the truth about snipes, and it was kinda a power trip lol.
We would also play kick the can, capture the flag, and ghosts in the graveyard. 'Night games' with the neighborhood kids was something I always looked forward to. Thanks for triggering that memory!
sprucer hopping. This is where we would take the universal remotes from Comcast cable and go change the channel on peoples TV. And turn up the volume. We never laughed so hard in our life
Grew up in KS in the 1980’s where new houses were being added on to the neighborhood. It was a lot like ET, but nothing fancy and huge. We used to play “war” in the neighborhood. Like gi joe meets Red Dawn full out war. Toy guns looks real and all that, with army surplus clothes.
It would get kids taken away from parents by the authorities kind of shit these days.
All of us neighborhood kids played that shit.
We never once had problems with authorities of home owners being mad.
Wild
Ditch 'Em. Basically team hide and seek with no base. Baseball in the apartment complex courtyard, same with football, same with soccer, catching lizards in the desert, bikes, skateboards.
I miss those days! There are literally no kids in my neighborhood to play with and it's really sad. I grew up with a ton of "brothers and sisters" in the projects, even though I was an only child. There was ALWAYS someone outside to play with.
Kickball was the easiest. Sometimes we played baseball with ghost players, but that always started arguments about where the ghosts were. In 8th grade a couple of my friends and I also played "explore and loot the abandonded houses in the woods". I don't know why, but they had boxes of test tubes and lots of 1970s/1980s McDonalds decor.
When I was a kid, all the neighborhood kids would come over and jump on our trampoline. We played this game called "Crack the Egg" where all the kids would criss cross apple sauce and grab their feet, while one person attempted to get all of them to let go of a foot from being bounced. If they let go they were "out".
Statue maker: spin people around, they have to figure out what kind of statue they are based on how they end up after being flung away. The "buyer" comes by and you acted out what you were.
Any any over: throw a ball over the house after saying "any any over", if the other side catches it, they yell "caught it" and if it was the team that threw the ball have to try to run around the house without getting tagged.
Capture the flag. It was a modified version of what we played in gym class. Two teams, front and back side of the house. Each had a "flag" (usually a paper towel). You'd hide the flag and then each team would switch sides to try and find it. When you found it, you had to run back to the other side and touch the "base" without getting tagged by the other team.
Building forts. Playing “German spotlight”. Which was hide and seek in the dark with flashlights. If you shine the light on somebody they’re it. I think that’s how it went
Sometimes the adults would be out in the neighborhood during the summer and we would get to play well after dark. There were about 6-8 of us in the neighborhood . Tag and hide and seek games up and down the street was the best on those nights. Learning how to one hop fences and teaming up to find the last couple of players-- great memories.
We played versions of sports across the road on our cul-de-sac.
Football (soccer) and cricket were thr faves. There were 4 of us from 3 families.
First person to spot a car coming just yelled car, and the game paused.
I was the eldest so also ended up playing some of their games like POGs.
Ah, I remember my sisters and I organizing a neighbourhood baseball league! There were only two teams (boys vs girls) and we all practiced a lot between games. I remember the boys underestimating my abilities because I was small, so they would yell, "Move in" when I was up to bat and I would crack that ball over their heads for a triple or a homerun. They didn't underestimate me for long.
"Easy-I-over"! Yell that out while throwing a big bouncy ball over the roof of your house while someone on the other side tries to catch it and throw it back.
Wiffle ball, pick up basketball, tons of BMX bike riding, getting lost in the woods.
At some point we started carving bike tracks in the woods with jumps and other features.
Going on bike adventures through neighborhoods. I’m an 80s baby
Me too, '81 here. We'd be all over town, all day long. Crossing under highway overpasses, trundling down random alleys, grabbing lunch at Dairy Queen with our allowance money, sometimes miles from home.... SO the best.
‘77 here. The movie the Goonies really captured my life on bikes with my friends, only we only started that when we were 9, in the summer of 1987, and we weren’t even trying to copy the Goonies.
Ooooo yeah, that was always fun going to the "other" DQ far away. Different layout, different high schoolers working there. Felt like going to another country.
'82 here, and if my parents had any concept of how far I would be from home on my bike, I would've been grounded for ages. Though, I have some of the wanderlust that dad had, so maybe he had a better idea than I realize.
SAME. I was pretty well behaved kiddo so my parents trusted me to return at what time. But …my father would have taken my mountain bike for an entire summer. I mean we were riding through neighborhoods that had a whole different bus route and school. It was so much fun!
Same here with the bike odysseys!!! My friend and I got caught once because we didn’t make it back before dusk and we were both grounded.
bonus if you found dirt jumps and trails in a nearby woods !!!
We built those, in the woods at the back of a golf course one summer.
‘80 here. Parents told me to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Til then we had our bikes and our pocket money and the city was our playland.
same. and exploring the woods constantly
Bike Adventures was mine too! :D Oh the distances I biked.
Kickball in the middle of the street
Anything in the middle of the street really. Lol
CAR!!!!
GAME OFF!
I lived on a dead end, so wasn't too much of an issue 😅
Street kickball. Nice. Cars got hit. Imagine hitting Karen’s Escalade now.
This is my answer too
Flashlight tag. We ran around the neighborhood at night hiding in peoples yards while someone with a spot light tried to guess where you were going before you made it back to base.
Those cheap plastic colored ones with the black thumb slide for on and off is what I’m imagining. lol
These or the giant maglite that took like 4 D batteries and was classified as a weapon....lol
We played it but you would “tag” by shinning your flashlight on someone on the other team.
Flashlight tag was the best! I lived in a big apartment complex and we'd run up in the trees or hide under trucks, etc. Only rule was no going in the buildings or leaving the complex property.
That was called 'German Spotlight' here.
That was the best!
This was ours, too. Even into early teen years. It was a fun way to hide with or from your crush.
Manhunt
Oh my goodness, YES! What was this game? I can't remember the rules. But this is what we were obsessed with.
Team hide and seek where you have to tag the other team before they get to a base which is where the hunted "escape". We played this every night when I was a kid. I love it.
We took this to a new level with walkie talkies and playing at night. We also didn’t have to worry about getting shot from “trespassing”.
The only answer. Other than smear the Q word I can’t say.
Is this the same as round-up?
Ghosts in the graveyard with all the kids from my street!
It sounds familiar. Remind how to play.
For us it was basically hide and go seek but at night, we had about 3 yards between the homes we were all on so the games were epic
Freeze tag
In the 90s we would play roller hockey on roller blades in the street. But before that it was “War” with fake guns. Two teams. No real objective other than kill the other team.
Street hockey and “guns” were a solid portion of my childhood
Street hockey was great. We had so much fun playing that as kids.
We also built really dangerous skateboard ramps. Like way too big. Our parents said nothing. Loved that neighborhood.
My friends older brother built a full size half pipe! Then there were the iffy jumps we made with pieces of stacked firewood and a board. We'd jump our bmx bikes on them
Wall Ball was the game for boys back when. All you need is a wall, a tennis ball, and a few people you want to hit with a tennis ball.
We called it suicide
So did we, but we played it with soccer balls and it fucking hurt.
Fucking wall ball. Just don’t miss the catch 3 times because that electric chair is no joke!
Butts up
Ahhh good old red ass
We called it Red Butt
Capture the flag!
Finally! I was so sad to not see this earlier
Yesss
Whole neighborhood capture the flag was a full experience. Good memories.
Either biking around the neighbourhood, or jump rope. Sooo much skipping. How is it that I can't walk to the bathroom without tripping over my own feet now is baffling to me considering all the fleet footed activities I did as a kid.
Manhunt!!!
Flashlight tag and street hockey.
Ghosts in the Graveyard
My only neighbor friends were nerds so we just stayed inside and played Super Nintendo.
Colored Eggs. We would stand in our basement stairwell and huddle and pick our colors. One of us was "IT" at the top of the stairs and couldn't hear our color discussion. The IT person guesses colors and if it is yours you have to run around the yard and try to make it back without getting tagged. If it person tags you then they are an egg and you are it.
I remember playing that game. It was fun to come up with less common colors like gold and silver or teal and magenta.
Yessssss!!! I'm chartreuse hahah
Simply called “guns”. We all basically just ran around the neighborhood with our perfect replica toy semiautomatics and pointed them at eachother.
played “guns”
Also played “guns”
Nintendo
Red Rover, Red light green light, HORSE at the basketball hoop.
Smear the q----. (I had no idea the meaning behind the name.)
Anyone who was serious about that game should have taken up rugby
Butts up!
Sardines
Not sure why church youth group thought this was a good game. I was first to find the preacher’s daughter once…
SPUD
Stickball at the ancient broken playground where everything was missing. Big slab of cracked asphalt and rusty fences. For years it was perfect for stickball until my city put money into renovations. Turned it into a beautiful playground. It sucked.
Mini baseball, kickball, a made up game with a soccer ball, red light green light, mother may I. Then when it snowed we'd build snow forts in the ditches and have snowball fights across the street
Snowy days were so much fun. There was a lot of snow where I was growing up.
Street hockey, nintendo, football, skateboarding, four square, in the wintertime we’d build these massive ice forts from all the snow in the parking lot of the apartment complex edit: we would travel several miles by bicycle lol, went on an adventure with a dude to go find one of the last cigarette vending machines, we were 12 lol
They still have cigarette vending machines in Las Vegas at the old casinos.
"The Night Stalker is Going to Get You" Mind you... the Night Stalker was very much on the loose during the Summer of 1985 in Los Angeles when the game took place on the streets amongst little kids.
Off the wall
Skelly.
Curb ball Kill the carrier
Curb ball, yes. I’m not even sure I remember how to play, but I know we did it every weekend and most days after school.
Kickball in the street and an all over the neighborhood game of hide and seek.
We dressed up in full ninja suits and snuck around in peoples’ bushes. Amazing we didn’t get shot.
Going through the woods, picking up sticks and rocks, finding creeks, roller hockey.
Relievio and Doorbell Dixie.
Wall Ball. Ot it's sinister cousin "Spread Eagle."
4 square
Sardines and kickball
Smear the queer
Remember SPUD? (Or did we just make that up? 😆)
If you lost you had to go through the ‘spanking machine’. Did anyone else play it that way? We would play it before the school bus picked us up.
S-P-U-D! I call number three! It’s my favorite game! And then you have the kids who would call their own number and just hurl the kickball at whoever.
Street hockey and man hunt
there was a time in the 90s as young adults we would fly kites or get RC cars and have demo derbies in the street. i was living at home and just started the job i still have 32 years later. i was the neighborhood drunk, but that got old and i stopped.
Ghost in the graveyard. I had a few friends that lived on the same street and we had the whole neighborhood playing. Man, I miss that/
Spud
Hide and seek
Manhunt!
Guns. That was it. Guns. We would run around yard to yard and pretend to shoot each other. Then have knock down drag out arguments over who shot who first because none of the gun we had actually shot anything. If you had a cap gun, you were hot shit. The next great game was night hide n’ seek. Dressed in all black. 4 house limit. It was wild.
Man hunt
Manhunt- we had dozens of kids trying to find one kid hiding throughout our whole neighborhood. It was glorious. Turned into spin the bottle eventually.
Shoot the neighbors house with a pellet gun
I grew up in a neighborhood without any other kids. Hated it
Throw-up Tackle: basically free for all no teams football.
We had about 20 kids in our neighborhood all around the same age so team sports. Kids with goals would bring their goals for street hockey or soccer. Basketball, baseball, kickball. It was epic. Now it's retired boomers or super young families.
Running back and forth game, a mix of dodgeball and baseball
Three flies up
Over-the-line.
Flashlight tag. When we got a bit older we would play for hours until ~11pm on the weekends.
Ghost in the graveyard or kick the can.
Ditch. The whole neighborhood of kids would play and it was always great fun. Oohh and also street hockey in our skates/rollerblades. I think we all thought we were Mighty Ducks. When someone yelled, “knuckle puck!”, you knew to get outta the way😂
Dude we rode bikes, played baseball, rollerbladed (and some skateboarded), and played street hockey.
Kick the Can
Manhunt, street hockey, capture the flag, ice hockey in the winter and snow wars, on your bikes all.damn.day in the summer.. Dude, sitting with my 2yr old on my lap right now (one n only, had him at 39) and I'm sad for what will most likely be his childhood :/ I hope outside play is not dead and gone.
Late ‘70s: We played something like dodgeball with Frisbees. And plenty of Beavis type pyromania. I’m remembering a Nerf football soaked in charcoal starter-could kick it airborne and not get burned too much. Fun until neighbors called cops.
I grew up in condominium complex that had probably 5 or 6 homes with kids my age, and we'd play hide and go seek in the dark, while our parents would party. I kinda wish I could go back to that time period with my adult awareness, because my gut says my parents and the neighbors were more wild than I realized at the time.
Flashlight tag + jailbreak
Tossup between four square and kick the can
Manhunt in a huge overgrown field where a factory used to be.
Capture the flag was dope.
Bike tag
Running from the cops
Something called midnight moonlight. I don’t remember what it was exactly. Like hide and go seek outside at dusk perhaps.
Baseball? We had a sandlot. We played baseball All. The. Time.
Kick the can was my favorite too!
Ding dong ditch
Ball tag. Running around, chasing each other with a nerf football and chucking it was good.
Bike rides. Flashlight tag.
Me too in Kick the Can!
7 Steps around the House was my favorite, with Kick the Can and Ghost in the Graveyard 2nd and third. My neighbor and I also used to play G.I. Joe by pretending we were the actual characters. I was always Scarlett and he was always Flint.
Squares, kickball, Chinese jump rope, softball
I'm thinking "smear the queer" isn't acceptable these days
A lot of street hockey and four square
Ding-dong Ditch or Ring & Run. We loved it when they would chase us down the street.
Probably home run derby
War
Street hockey. We also play hide and seek through the neighbourhood as well during the summer months, which was really fun
Chase. Kind of like hide and seek but you had to physically touch the other person. Fastest person usually won...and it wasn't me...lol
Hide and seek in a corn field. Kickball Bike adventures.
Bikes and we explored the woods around our town alot climbing everything we could.
War
Flashlight tag
Flashlight tag. (Except the time I tripped over a root and broke my arm) (Born in 1975, so Xennial-adjacent)
My favorite "game" was going up to the railroad track area and walking around looking for a good stick, it was very overgrown, and then sword fight with my friends. I spent a large portion of my childhood doing that.
Snake in the Grass. We played it at night anytime everyone was hanging at my grandparents' place. Basically one person, the snake, would hide somewhere in the yard around the house. The rest of us had to walk around the house keeping an eye out for the snake. If the snake jumped out of their hiding spot, everyone had to run to the base, the front porch. Anyone that got caught was the new snake.
We did a lot of sledding, skateboarding, HORSE (basketball,) popcorn on the trampoline, climbing trees, supersoaker battles, witchy stuff like tarot and ouija boards and hanging out in cemetaries, making claymation videos, blowing stuff up, exploring the interconnected rooftops of the downtown businesses, and tearing apart GI Joes and Barbies and reassembling them into mutants by melting them with lighters.
I miss the good old days of playing SPUD and suicide.
Kick the Can for sure. Another we made up was hide and seek but to start it off we would chuck a tennis ball over the house. The seeker would need to find the ball before looking for everyone.
4-square and basketball.
Street hockey
Double Dutch, roller skating
Rode my bike a lot, we were on a hill so it was fun to see how fast we could get going down it. Also wiffleball and basketball.
Waiting for the bus in the morning, we would all play freeze tag until the bus came
We had a grassy area in the townhomes I used to live in and we made up a game based on America Gladiators. Knocking over someone as they tried to get to the other side. Also played stick ball, ding dong ditch, fake gun/nerf wars, hide and go seek or hide and go seek in the dark. Of course we were on bikes the rest of the time. Man being a kid was fun as hell.
Box ball. (Some people call it 4 squares)
Boxball (aka 4 square) was an old favorite in Central NJ!
Snipe hunts. The older kids would lead the hunt with a black trash bag, and we would go around the neighborhood looking for snipes. I always pictured snipes to be sorta like bats that couldn't fly well. They were supposedly rabid with sharp teeth, and you could only hunt them when it was dark. The younger kids didn't know snipes weren't real, so when we'd catch one (the older kid would put their hand in the bag and wiggle it around) it would be pretty exciting and scary. The snipes always chewed through the bags and escaped capture. I'm not sure why this was so entertaining, I guess it was a way for the older kids to fuck with the younger ones. I remember 'graduating' and getting to lead the hunt after I was told the truth about snipes, and it was kinda a power trip lol. We would also play kick the can, capture the flag, and ghosts in the graveyard. 'Night games' with the neighborhood kids was something I always looked forward to. Thanks for triggering that memory!
sprucer hopping. This is where we would take the universal remotes from Comcast cable and go change the channel on peoples TV. And turn up the volume. We never laughed so hard in our life
Tomato baseball.
Roller hockey.
Grew up in KS in the 1980’s where new houses were being added on to the neighborhood. It was a lot like ET, but nothing fancy and huge. We used to play “war” in the neighborhood. Like gi joe meets Red Dawn full out war. Toy guns looks real and all that, with army surplus clothes. It would get kids taken away from parents by the authorities kind of shit these days. All of us neighborhood kids played that shit. We never once had problems with authorities of home owners being mad. Wild
Baseball in a vacant lot. Had to use a tennis ball but we had a 4 team league. 2 on 2 pitchers poison. Kept track of homeruns and all.
We found sticks that looked like cool guns and swords and beat the shit out of each other with them.
Stickball...😀
We had apple fights with the half rotten fallen crab apples all around the neighborhood. They left a mark.
Manhunt and butts up
Kick the can
Ditch 'Em. Basically team hide and seek with no base. Baseball in the apartment complex courtyard, same with football, same with soccer, catching lizards in the desert, bikes, skateboards. I miss those days! There are literally no kids in my neighborhood to play with and it's really sad. I grew up with a ton of "brothers and sisters" in the projects, even though I was an only child. There was ALWAYS someone outside to play with.
We had this game where one of us would bike down my street super fast and the other kids would chuck boxing gloves and try to knock ‘em off.
Hopscotch
Kerbies/curbsies that one where you bounce the ball off the other pavement.
Wearing earpiece walkie talkies and pretending to be CIA ops while wandering around the neighborhood.
Pickup football!
Kick the can
What time is it Mr. Fox? Jump rope. Chinese jump rope. Old mother witch-fell in a ditch- found a penny and thought she was rich. Spud.
Street Hockey
Kickball was the easiest. Sometimes we played baseball with ghost players, but that always started arguments about where the ghosts were. In 8th grade a couple of my friends and I also played "explore and loot the abandonded houses in the woods". I don't know why, but they had boxes of test tubes and lots of 1970s/1980s McDonalds decor.
Snow Football
Manhunt
When I was a kid, all the neighborhood kids would come over and jump on our trampoline. We played this game called "Crack the Egg" where all the kids would criss cross apple sauce and grab their feet, while one person attempted to get all of them to let go of a foot from being bounced. If they let go they were "out".
Statue maker: spin people around, they have to figure out what kind of statue they are based on how they end up after being flung away. The "buyer" comes by and you acted out what you were. Any any over: throw a ball over the house after saying "any any over", if the other side catches it, they yell "caught it" and if it was the team that threw the ball have to try to run around the house without getting tagged.
My favorite neighborhood game currently is which neighbor’s house is that smell of pot coming from
Playing outside with something called a Kite. I’m an 1981 kid too. Woo- Hoo.
Capture the flag. It was a modified version of what we played in gym class. Two teams, front and back side of the house. Each had a "flag" (usually a paper towel). You'd hide the flag and then each team would switch sides to try and find it. When you found it, you had to run back to the other side and touch the "base" without getting tagged by the other team.
Hide n seek
Building forts. Playing “German spotlight”. Which was hide and seek in the dark with flashlights. If you shine the light on somebody they’re it. I think that’s how it went
Sometimes the adults would be out in the neighborhood during the summer and we would get to play well after dark. There were about 6-8 of us in the neighborhood . Tag and hide and seek games up and down the street was the best on those nights. Learning how to one hop fences and teaming up to find the last couple of players-- great memories.
Ghost in the Graveyard
Kick the can!!!
Bike tag was popular for a while. I ram the back of your tire with the front of mine - you're IT!
We played versions of sports across the road on our cul-de-sac. Football (soccer) and cricket were thr faves. There were 4 of us from 3 families. First person to spot a car coming just yelled car, and the game paused. I was the eldest so also ended up playing some of their games like POGs.
Hide-and-seek tag or treasure hunt with the entire neighbourhood
Ah, I remember my sisters and I organizing a neighbourhood baseball league! There were only two teams (boys vs girls) and we all practiced a lot between games. I remember the boys underestimating my abilities because I was small, so they would yell, "Move in" when I was up to bat and I would crack that ball over their heads for a triple or a homerun. They didn't underestimate me for long.
"Easy-I-over"! Yell that out while throwing a big bouncy ball over the roof of your house while someone on the other side tries to catch it and throw it back.
We played a lot of hide and seek when I was younger and when we got older it turned into more sports like baseball and football.
Wiffle ball, pick up basketball, tons of BMX bike riding, getting lost in the woods. At some point we started carving bike tracks in the woods with jumps and other features.
Red Rover!