You Can't Hide in the Nerd Herd

This was compiled by Mike Polk with assistance from Jim Fath.

Just about every summer kids everywhere sit around, eat, and play video games while cultivating crippling diabetes. But some kids still manage actually get up and occasionally go outside to play age-old childhood games that have been passed down from generation to generation. Most of these popular games are extremely dangerous and, in some cases, illegal.

Wherever you grew up, you undoubtedly played one of these games. What follows is a completely subjective top-10 Most Awesomely Violent and Dangerous Children's Games.







10 - Red Rover
Kids just must have been out of ideas when they came up with this game. You literally just run as hard as you can into the opposing team and hope that you are able to break through their in-locked grasp. The game is essentially a self-inflicted clothesline. An early lesson in exploiting the weak, children learned quickly that the best strategy was to determine the most tenuous link, preferably two frail, timid girls, and send your fattest team member careening at them as if there was pie on the other side.


9 - Backyard Football
Just as a reminder, when professional athletes, who are incredibly well trained full grown men in top physical condition, play this game, they are required to wear an endless variety of padding and a helmet to prevent injury. Yet somehow our parents allowed us to take to the backyard gridiron wearing nothing but Umbros and a Quicksilver t-shirt. I'm pretty sure I saw a kid get tackled and die once.

And unlike professional football, in which fields are meticulously designed to prevent injury with padded sod and an even plane, our playing fields were another opponent in themselves. Roots, rocks, and stumps are the least of your worries on your way towards the end zone (an invisible goal line that ran between two trees that were semi-aligned). Tiki Barber never has to worry about stepping into a random storm drain that's obscured by leaves and breaking his femur in six places.

8 - Dodge Ball
Obviously the cruelest of all children's sports and the one that best illustrates Darwin's Survival of the Fittest Theory, this game is a classic. The grown up bully gym teacher who invented it clearly had a hard-on for watching nerds get punished. Probably because so many that he went to school with went on to achieve great things and lead fulfilling lives, while he was teaching kids the art of "Four Square". But how did he convince the administrators to allow him to use those wonderfully painful, stinging red balls? Nerf is clearly a more humane alternative. Still, you can't beat the sound of that rubbery missile when it smacks off a nerd's face, embedding his sports glasses deep into his sallow, tear-filled face.

7 - King Of The Mountain
How beautifully simplistic was this game? This must have been created by the poorest children in the world, because all it requires is a mound of dirt and no respect for your physical well-being. Boys of various sizes vie for the highest position on top of said mound, with the largest boy inevitably claiming the spot and maintaining it by smacking down his scrawnier assailants until he was either bored, recess was over, or someone broke their collarbone.






6 - Musical Chairs
This must have been a game created by a severely under funded school district. In this “game” there is one less chair than there are kids. As music plays, the children dance around the chairs in a happy circle until suddenly, the music stops, and every child instinctively barrels down towards the first available chair like it’s the last chopper out of Saigon. In the midst of the mad scramble, one child is sent reeling to the ground in a heap and is then taunted mercilessly by their classmates. Another chair is removed and the violent dance continues.

Fat kids had an extreme advantage in this game, for though skinny children could out-pursue fat kids to the open chairs, the porkers always managed to muscle their wiry opponents off the seat with their enormous backyards


5-Slip And Slide (AKA Slip N Slide or The Kentucky Wet Tarp)
I think I might actually be a little pissed at my parents for buying me one of these. What the fuck was wrong with them? I'm not saying it wasn't fun, but I'm pretty sure this "toy" is the reason that I have a limp to this day and my left shoulder instantly dislocates when someone bumps into me on the sidewalk.

This was a wet, slippery piece of plastic lying on the ground. That's it. And we were never too choosy about where we put this thing down either. Stones, sticks, and shards of my drunken father's angrily-discarded broken beer bottles usually made their appearance under the glorified yellow tarp right around mid-Slide. We often practiced poor planning when positioning the end of the Slip and Slide as well. Generally, our reward for a successful, complete ride was a face full of sidewalk or garage. After an hour of wet and wild fun, my friends and I usually looked like a collection of small battered housewives.


4 - Punch Bug (AKA Punch buggy, Slug Bug or Punch Beetle):
Another deliciously mindless game. This was clearly developed by an older brother who was bored on a long car ride to Myrtle Beach. Here's the gist: When you see a Volkswagen, you punch the person next to you. Do you want me to go over that again?

So really, the only strategy involved in this game is to see cars faster than your fellow passengers. In the event of a tie, two people get punched. In the event of a False Slugbug in which the sighting of a Volkswagen later proves to be erroneous, you still got punched. And there's nothing you can do about it. What's done is done. The debate still rages on as to whether or not the NEW Volkswagen Beetle constitutes an actual “slug bug” or not.


3 - Swimming Pool Chicken
Let's see, how many dangerous elements can we combine at once? 1-Water. 2-The slipperiness that accompanies water. 3-Concrete. 4-Poor balance. 5-The impertinence of youth. Perfect. Let's do it!

So in this game, the skinnier kids gets on the fatter kids' shoulders and then they ram into each other and flail their arms until someone cracks their head on the side of the pool and severs their neck from their spinal column.

*It should be noted that some people go for the unorthodox, but occasionally effective method of putting the fat kid on the skinny kid's shoulders and using the fat kid as an imbalanced juggernaut, simply leaning on the opposing team and hoping that they hit the water first during the inevitable simultaneous fall, thus making the Fat-Top team victorious.


2 - Tug of War
Yet another game in which Fat kids ruled the day. The age old sport of tug of war is simple. You pull and they pull and only one can win. The tug of war is a cruel mistress whose end result was almost always the same; everyone is going to end up on the ground with skinned knees and severe rope burn.

Everybody falls down in tug of war. The victors fall backward and the losers fall forward. And just to make it worse, and literally gut wrenching, one of the two lucky kids who are granted the prestigious title of “Anchor” are going to have their kidneys crushed in a rope loop as they are dragged across the lawn, or worse, pavement, like some kind of sick tribute to the riotous death of Mussolini.






1 - Smear The Q