a couple of nights ago whilst driving home Danny Kelly was on the radio talking about old sports games you used to play with your friends before console games changed the world.

the obvious ones were subbuteo and scalextrix... then there were the more obscure ones casdon soccer which if i remember rightly had bobby charlton on the front , but bizarrely the teams were all white and red, as the big teams then were Liverpool and Leeds.

Arnold Palmer golf which was a man on the end of a stick , with interchangeable clubs.

world cup cricket which was similar to subbuteo , i think there was a rugby version also.

crossfire where you fired BB's at a larger BB in an effort to get it in the goal.

so the question is what did you used to play, and what other classics have now passed into a bygone era.

Before consoles there were Amstrads, Commodores and Spectrums. Before those... there was no before those. Life was terrible.

Jimmy

If just talking about “indoor” games the Battleship & Mastermind were always on the go in our house.

Outdoors it was the obvious variants involving a ball/football - cuppies, kerbie, 60 seconds, wallie - which sadly you don’t see much of these days

Battletops
Boxing robots
Footy board games of choice were Soccerama and Wembley.

When the Amstrad came out they had 'Brian Cloughs Football Fortunes'which was a cross between a board game and a computer game and of course Football Manager 2, the most addictive footy management game ever- wasted many a happy hour playing that!

We had a cardboard box to play with. That was when it wasn’t soggy because of raining in through the leaky man hole cover where we lived in our hole in the ground.

Test Match cricket was ace. Had a picture of Freddy Truman on the front, a batsman operated by pulling string who had a bat that looked like a hoover.

There was magnetic football:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USeZ3t78AdA" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I don't remember it like this though. I recall plastic 'sticks' with magnets on the end which used to get broken easily - usually in a temper!

....and before video games there was real life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihAEyZ25qfU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Imploding Turtle wrote:Before consoles there were Amstrads, Commodores and Spectrums. Before those... there was no before those. Life was terrible.

Actually you are wrong.

I take it you've never seen one of these before...........



We used to have the odd boozed up evening trying to save the world from Space Invaders.

Indoor: Draughts (/chess), Cards (snap, cheat, whist, crib don etc), darts, hangman, battleships, snakes and ladders, ludo, tiddly winks, doctors & nurses.
Outdoor: marbles (follow on and nug), skipping, tig, hide & seek, conkers, hopscotch, jacks, tin in ring (?), anything with a football (wallie against a garage front or gable end if only 2/3 lads, "pullovers for goalposts" else).

Super Cup Football remember playing it on way down to Wembley in 1988 on the coach floor! Annoyed everyone crawling under seats to retrieve the ball!

Blow football

For those fans of the old football manager games... you can now get an app , a remake of a 1982game

Subbuteo.
Board games, card games.
LEGO!!!!!!!!!!....back before all the current Uber cool stuff came out.
Scaletrix, train sets.

Out side involved lots of bike rides, climbing stuff like Rhuddlan castle, spending time on the beach with my radio controlled car, down the arcades and just before I became a teenager I discovered booze....my weekends became a bit hazy after that on a regular basis.

Amongst others we had a game of cricket played with dice.
The bowler threw and a couple of faces were wickets, a couple were dot balls and a couple were runs.
If it was runs the batter threw to decide how many.
On a wet day we could play test matches.

What were the little footballer statue like things called again? The ones with the big heads.

Knock a door run......!

Bin Ont Turf wrote:Actually you are wrong.

I take it you've never seen one of these before...........



We used to have the odd boozed up evening trying to save the world from Space Invaders.

They don't count because i never owned one. Therefore they don't exist. I had a Vectrex though, so they count.