Finding my Marbles again

My own children have been a bit obsessive about collecting marbles for a good few years now. In the occasional, and slightly ritualised, visits to the local toy shops they are drawn time and again to these shiny treasures with vows of great behaviour proffered should they get one or two to call their own. I’ve resisted the urge to make them the de facto currency of the welikeplay shed, but their may still be mileage in that idea.

As yet they are still collectables, rattling around in a large Roses tin or skipping down improvised marble runs, but it occurred to me yesterday that they should learn how to play the game. But I missed out on this, my schooling included yoyos, trading cards, conkers but no marbles; so I turned to The Pocket Dangerous Book for Boys: Things to Do , a great resource for the play-pro and not as gender-specific as it purports. Unfortunately No1 child’s copy has gone to live where the lost things are, so it was time to Google it.

for rules…

Google does reveal many things, like the ancient Egyptian probably played marbles with little clay balls, that the Elgin Marbles are not actually marbles but huge chunks of storytelling friezes, and documentation from the 1969 World Championships. And there are also a host of rules for marbles, so I picked one using my instincts and my usual caveat that rules in children’s games belong to the kids. Rules are there to be bickered over, twisted, broken, rehashed and held as infallible and ineffable - however hard this is on grown-up’s brains.

Taw

• Draw a big circle on the ground, anything up to the diameter of your biggest child’s standing jump. We’ll be using the old sand pit to stop glass splinters.
• 49 marbles are piled up in the middle. Why 49? I admit ignorance, but I trust it’ll work out.
• They take their ‘tolley’, that marble which they’ll be using to hammer the rest. Stand up, hold it to their nose and drop it to see who can get it just inside the ring. The closest to the edge goes first.
• Hold the tolley marble in the coiled crook of your finger then ping it out with your thumb. Now this takes some practice, so I’m definitely heading out to the garden to provide the lawnmower with ammunition.
• With their firing hand on the ring they fire their tolley into the unsuspecting marbles, winning any of the marbles that get knocked out. Player gets another go if marbles are liberated - perhaps only if the tolley stays in the ring.
• If the tolley lands in the ring, it stays there until their next go; but then it is open to attack by the opponent, who if they manage to knock it out with their own gains an advantag, as the original holder of the stranded tolley has to ‘knuckle down’ by flipping with the back of their hand on the floor. This is a lovely opportunity to suggest they invent more and more forfeits for multiple-offenders, like under-legged, knuckle-dragging, Doctor-Who-theme-humming, tolley-flicking.
• Most marbles wins.

Enjoy.

tag... play for today, 5up, 8up, collecting, toys, traditional games