It was probably Better Half's and my visit to the
Strong National Museum of Play that inspired me to think and write about board games
a couple posts ago. Then I promised a follow-up on children's games, but come to think of it, a lot of the games I've blogged about
so far are games I played as a child (
Parcheesi/Ludo, Clue/Cluedo, checkers/draughts,
slapjack/snap). So, while not repeating those, here are some more.
It's not surprising that a lot of playground games (like a lot of nursery rhymes--there's fodder for another post) are different (in name and rules) in the two countries, since they also vary a lot from playground to playground within a country. Those kinds of games are passed on by oral tradition, and traditions get muddled and/or developed from time to time, so that we're left with games with just vague family resemblances. One of these was raised by the
mysterious Dearieme on the previous games post: (BrE)
British bulldog(s). When I looked up the game on some website, I didn't recogni{s/z}e the rules as those of (AmE)
Red Rover, but according to the Canadian
Dialect Topography site (skip down to item 73), the two terms are used synonymously in Canada. The games are no doubt related, but the description of British Bulldog on
Wikipedia sounds little like the game that we called
Red Rover on my old playground. There, there was no breaking through a chain of people or getting tagged, as described on various website descriptions of Red Rover. No, it was a game of social exclusion at my school (that and
kickball were the only kinds of games we played)--the person who was 'it' would say "Red Rover, Red Rover let X come over" where X would be a colo(u)r (of clothing) or another physical/clothing attribute (e.g. "let t-shirts come over"). The 'it' would do this until some poor soul they didn't like was the only person left on the other side and they then knew where they stood on the social hierarchy. But apparently that's not how the game was
meant to be played. Better Half says "That's not a game. That's bullying with a rhyme!" Perhaps it's explained to him some of my less appealing adult behavio(u)rs. ("Explained, but not forgiven," crowed BH.)
Kickball, while we're at it, does not mean (BrE)
football/(AmE)
soccer, as it
can (BrE
can do) in BrE, where, according to the OED, it's spelt
kick-ball and started out as a Scotticism. In the US,
kickball is much the same as
baseball, except that an inflated ball (about the size of a soccer/foot-ball) is rolled on the ground and kicked instead of a smaller ball being thrown and hit with a bat. It was a staple in my (AmE)
gym class (=PE [physical education]) and on our playground. (Since I went to a poor (AmE)
Catholic school/(BrE)
convent (school), our playground was a church parking lot. So none of this new-fangled climbing equipment and such that kids get these days. And I had to walk there, waist deep in snow. Past man-eating earthworms. Yeah, you kids don't know how good you've got it. I tell you, in my day...)
Let's get back to board games, though, as that's where I meant to be. The most shocking discovery at the Strong Museum was that Better Half had never seen, played nor even heard of
Candy Land, a game that only three-year-olds could love. It's one of those games where one has to advance around the board to a final goal. To make it easy for tiny tots, the spaces on the board are different colo(u)rs, and on each turn one takes a card with a block or two of a colo(u)r or a picture of a landmark on the board (like the (AmE)
Candy Cane Forest). That way, the child can tell where they need to get to without having to count their way there. Parents and (orig. AmE)
babysitters/
child-care workers (BrE
child-minders) soon learn to stack the deck so that the child will pick the Lollypop Woods card early and the game will soon be finished. I pretended that I felt sorry for BH that he'd missed out on this game, but really I was seething with jealousy.
The advancing-up-the-board game that one does find in Britain is
Snakes and Ladders (picture left from
here), which was marketed in the US as
Chutes and Ladders by Milton Bradley (picture right from
here)--the same evil geniuses who brought us Candy Land. As the names suggest, in the more traditional British version the board has ladders that one can advance up and snakes that one must slide down, to a less advantageous positio
n. But who in real life goes down snakes? The literal-minded Americans changed them to chutes, and the boards there reflect this.
Another game for playing with very young children is the memory game (AmE)
Concentration/(BrE)
Memory, which proves that the Americans don't have the patent on literal-mindedness. That's the one where you have a set of cards in which each card has a matching mate. A player turns one over and then gets one chance to turn over the mate. If the two cards match, the player keeps them and has another go. If they don't match, the cards are turned back over and the next player has a try.
One of the toys at the museum that BH was able to wax nostalgic about was the
Erector Set--except, of course, that he knows it by the name
Meccano. (I've just discovered there's a
Meccano web ring. There's a web ring for everything these days.) But as a child in England in the 70s he didn't have Slinky or Mr Potato Head or Silly Putty. And he certainly didn't have
Lincoln Logs.
Disraeli Log just doesn't have the same ring.
Postscript! I forgot to discuss a children's amusement that I'd promised to
M.A. Peel. (Apologies, Mrs Peel.) Remember dot-to-dot puzzles? In AmE, one must
connect the dots, while in BrE one
joins the dots--and thus the puzzles are sometimes called
connect-the-dots or
join-the-dots, depending on where you are. The verb difference carries over into metaphorical use of the phrases--i.e. 'to find the connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information' (or something like that).
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