Home Made Games

Say Lee added a comment to my post about his blog last week, mentioning old fashioned games that he used to play as a child like spinning tops and collecting bottle caps. It started me thinking back to all the home-made games we used to play as kids in Malaysia. We had our share of Action Man and Barbie doll toys, Lego and toy cars etc so we were fortunate kids in that respect. However, we also had fun playing with home-made gadgets and toys, especially with other kids at school or cousins we visited in my mother’s hometown in Taiping.

Recently, my mum was clearing out our cupboards at home in KL and found a packet of “five stones” right at the back. “Five stones” is a picking up game rather like jacks but instead of a bouncy ball and plastic bits to pick up, you play with cloth-sewn packets of dried rice the size of marbles. You scatter them on the floor, pick one up and throw that into the air - while it’s in the air, you pick up each of the remaining four packets in different sequences, catching the flying one at the end of each move. These ones that my mum found were made out of cloth from old pyjamas and must be over 30 years old! They are rather manky and I’m a bit nervous about picking them up in case they crumble to dust in my hands. She had brought them over instead of chucking them straight in the bin because it was amazing that they had survived all these years and it was fun for us all to look back at those days together.

I would play “five stones” with my friends in break time at school in KL, sitting in a circle on the cement floor. We also used to play a skipping game with a “rope” made out of rubber bands woven together - I was never very good at that, not being terribly well co-ordinated, but I remember enjoying stringing the rubber bands together and marvelling at how a cluster of these little things could become a long rope.

When we were a bit older, there was that paper game where you folded a piece of paper into an opening and closing flower and wrote a “prediction” in different quadrants. Holding it in your two hands, you’d ask someone to pick one of the four colours you had coloured in on the top and then spell the colour out as you opened and closed the “flower”. They would then un-leaf a petal where the last word landed and find their future “predicted” underneath. I have no idea what the paper thingy game is called but I loved creating different flowers with different predictions and colours.

I guess these are all girly games. I wonder if they are still played in my old school back in KL (Bukit Bintang Girls Shool 2). Or perhaps other home-made games have been invented since then. Can anyone tell me?

UPDATE: Oh wow, I was just searching the internet to find a picture of “five stones” and the Singapore Museum shop is selling a set (with pouch) as “traditional toys” for S$8.00! The online store description says: “Five stones (or four, if you prefer) would be played by a group of children sitting in a circle in the hot afternoons and taking turns to throw the stones in the air, catching them with one hand, in a variety of patterns.”