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Owzat!

In the days before TV channels targetted at the young and certainly before X Boxes and the like, the young English boy may have played table top cricket on a wet sunday afternoon, one dice playing the bowler, the other playing the batsman. Sold under the brand name Owzat.

Any one else remember childhood games that were pre electronic?

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My sister and I would play Jacks for hours. She was so fast and skilled at Jacks, even though I regularly lost, I loved watching her in amazement as she cleaned the floor of Jacks.
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Jacks was a good game, still have a set but not in the original metal. As i recall you bounced the ball on the table and then had to pick up as many jacks as you could before catching the ball.
 

ajkel64

Check Out Chick
Staff member
I still have my game of Test Match at my parents house in my old bedroom. I think it sort of still works. I think when you slide the bowlers thing forward and back it doesn’t always move and same with the batsman’s slide.
 
We spun tops in the street, played croquet in the back yard. Invented dice baseball using the box score lineups from the paper.Played pick up sticks and shot marbles. Y0yos and what ever else that I can't remember.
 
I've still got my Subbuteo stuff in a box in the spare room - pitch, goals, fencing, flags and about 12 teams IIRC. When I was a kid I had it set up on a board in the garage, used to for hours.

When I moved from the parental home, it went with me in a box, and it's been to Jakarta, Bangkok and now Singapore, same box!
 
My earliest memories of childhood games in the 50s (besides playing on railroad tracks and dodging trains), was playing a version of baseball, bouncing a pink ball off the church steps across the street. Didn't need a team or equipment, and only needed 2-4 kids. Marbles was another. Lawn Darts with the metal spikes was a lot of fun. Kids were smarter back then. Parents didn't teach kids that they were special and cars had to stop for them when crossing the street. We were also smart enough to step out of the way of a Lawn Dart, and never had anyone get injured. Stratego was another 2-player favorite of mine. Chess was another favorite. In the 70s, I worked with a guy who was a pothead. We'd smoke a joint before we'd played. Our wives would laugh and make fun of us, because we could never remember whose turn it was. Yahtzee is still a great family game. If the kids or grandkids come over, there's sure to a game going at some point. Clue and 221 Baker Street were also fun.

That said, I'm going back to killing things on Diablo II Resurrected.
 
We had magnet table top football. The bases of the players held a magnetic disc. A long stick with a magnet on the end was used, under the table, to move the players around the pitch. This would have been in the early to mid 1960's Great fun.
 
We had magnet table top football. The bases of the players held a magnetic disc. A long stick with a magnet on the end was used, under the table, to move the players around the pitch. This would have been in the early to mid 1960's Great fun.

I had forgotten that game, I also had one, as I recall
I tried to move the footballer faster than the magnetic attraction.
 
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