Little Miss Drinkalot reminisces about the games she used to play when she was young: Five Stones and Zero Point.

Now, I was a boy through and through, so five stones and zero point weren’t the types of games we played in our all-boys mission school.

The kinds of games I played as a kid were, in my opinion, the classics. None of that pokemon pikachu nonsense. If it wasn’t Catching (or “tag”, as they call it in Americanese), it was Police and Thief. Somehow, it was always more fun to play the thieves. On the less active side, the table-top games included kuti-kuti; eraser wrestling where the object of the game was to get your eraser to flip on top of your opponent’s eraser. The loser usually lost his eraser. I know I definitely lost many!

For the more strategically inclined, marbles was the fad at one point of my childhood. Players wagered their marbles inside a circle drawn on the sand and took turns trying to knock the marbles out of the circle. If you knocked it out, it was yours. It was a game of skill and strategy.

I think the most high-tech among all the childhood toys and games we played were the handheld computer games. This was way before the gameboy and the brickgame clones. Two particular games stand out from memory: Western Bar and the Submarine game which were the chunkiest and noisiest handheld consoles of the time. In Western bar, a bartender rolled out dishes and tankards of beer (presumably) and your cowboy character had to shoot them before they hit the floor. If you missed, the cowboy would cry and lose his “life”. Although now that I think about it, in both cases the plates broke anyway, so what was he crying about? I never had one myself, and always relied on my friends to lend me their handheld just to savour the few minutes of playing the game. It was the “it” toy to have, and the sure way to win instant popularity in school was to get one. I wonder if they’re still in production now?