While shopping for some games as Angel Tree gifts, I came to realize that so many games today are electronic games. It made me begin to think back to my own childhood days and the games that we used to play.Since we were poor a lot of our games were free or very inexpensive to play. I remember that one of our favorite indoor games was to play a card game named “Go Fishing” or “Go Fish”. It is usually played with two to five players. Usually both the adults and the kids would join in a Go Fish game.
Using a standard card deck, 7 cards are dealt to each of the players. The rest of the deck is spread out in the center of the table. The first player will ask another player to give them their cards of a particular rank. For example, “Give me all your Queens”. The requesting player cannot ask for a card that they are not holding in their own hand.If the player asked has any cards of the requested rank, they hand them over and the requesting player earns another turn. If the player asked does not have any cards of the requested rank, they say “go fish” or “go fishing”. The requesting player then draws a card from the pool in the center of the table.When a player has four cards of a given rank, then they have “a book” and they place that book face up in front of them on the table. When a player runs out of cards they draw a card from the pool and the game continues until all cards are gone from the pool. At that time the games ends and the player with the most books wins.We had several different card games that we could play with that same deck of cards.When the weather was good and we could play outdoors, we would entertain ourselves with a neighborhood baseball or softball game or we would take a stick and draw out a hop scotch game in the dirt or a sandy area.
We lived in a rural area and our preference was to play outdoors. We would take walks in the woods and go down to the nearby swimming hole on a hot day.Today kids start out as very small children with learning DVDs, TV entertainment and as they grow there are all the video games that eat up hours and hours of their time.That’s not to say that these games cannot be shared between the adults and children. For instance, the Mario Kart Wii is a game that is loved by the racing fan dad as much as the kids.Learning DVDs can help the child with getting a head start on things like their A-B-Cs before they even start to kinder care.And even before that, the parents can get an entertaining DVD that helps the child learn potty training.Little girls still get dolls; they are just more sophisticated. Dolls today are almost like a real baby. Families years ago had so many children that I guess we just had the real thing to learn from about what babies really do.Little boys still get toy trucks but I guess you don’t have to really push them by hand anymore.There is nothing overly good or bad about the old and the present, however it is sometimes fun to just look back and compare. It’s even fun to share with your kids some of the older games and play them together.
