Gulliver wrote:finlay wrote:you call that "it"? it's called tig in the uk and tag in america.
It's called tig in some parts of the UK; at my primary school, it was called
it. Stuck in the mud was called
sticky toffee (which is the one where someone has to crawl through your legs to release you, inevitably headbutting you in the crotch).
Indeed - I've never heard of "tig". I think I've heard stuck in the mud called 'sticky toffee', though (I think that may have been one of those weird words you discover other people use when you get to secondary school). Guess should be no surprise, given that you and I grew up in the same general area. I also agree entirely with your bun/bap/roll distinction, although I'd make more general the rule about bap texture - baps lack crust and are soft and light, as well as being flat.
Finlay: I think twenty-twenty was the only one I didn't explain, because I thought it was ubiquitous, like hide-and-seek. Twenty-twenty is a varient of hide-and-seek, but those being sought can render themselves safe and uncatchable by reaching a particular area, or more commonly by touching a particular object (eg a chair). The catcher therefore hangs around the target object, and the seekers attempt to run in when the catcher isn't looking. It's considered unsporting for the catcher to just stand next to the thing - since if they do, nobody runs in and neither side wins and the game never ends. Instead, the catcher goes some distance from the target, in the pretence of searching the area for people hiding, while luring people to make a run for the target. The running bit involves having to cover the distance before the catcher can shout 'twenty-twenty, I see ____', and often involves amusingly crashing and knocking over the target and/or each other.
In some versions, particularly in larger areas and with more people, the catcher recruits the ones they catch to serve as more catchers, so that some can guard the target while others fan out looking for the ones who haven't been caught yet.
In case the others weren't clear: when I say 'with homes', i mean that the game allows safe areas in which you can't make people it. Some versions also allow some sort of 'no returns' formula to stop two people just continually itting each other at close range.
Bulldog is played on a large rectangle, with homes at either end (we usually used an area marked out for football, where the homes were behind the goallines and spectators could stand behind the touchlines). Everyone is in one home, with It, now called Bulldog, in the middle. Everyone runs en masse to the other home, and bulldog tried to grab and hold someone as they pass (unlike normal it, you can't just touch them, you have to actually stop them, and ideally tackle them to the ground - I guess that's the reason for the name?). If someone is caught, they become an additional bulldog, and so on. You can run between homes by yourself if you like, but this is reckless - it's safer for everyone to do it in one go. This is ideally played by as many people as possible at one go. Often the bulldogs start out as being the older children - in fact sometimes at secondary school at the end of the year the younger teachers would join in as bulldogs.
We played bulldog at both primary and secondary school, usually in bouts - people would start playing it, more people would play it, until it reached a level of chaos and violence where the authorities had to step in and ban it for a while.
Hotbot, which I also didn't explain, has nothing to do with it-games at all. People gather alongside a wall, with one or more tennis balls. People throw the ball(s) at the wall, and other people have to catch them. If you throw the ball and someone catches it without it having hit the ground - or if it has hit the ground but they catch it with one hand - you earn a forfeit. Likewise, if you try to catch the ball and drop it, or if it just hits you, you earn a forfeit. The forfeit is having to run across the face of the wall while everybody throws tennis balls at you as hard as they can. If you get hit by a tennis ball, you then have another forfeit - this time you have to stand in front of the wall, facing the wall, while everybody else throws tennis balls at you as hard as they can.
Teachers didn't like that one, either, for some reason. It also frequently resulting in inter-age aggravation, since my school was made up of narrow areas between buildings, which inevitably were constantly used as hotbot arenas, so that even innocent people trying to walk anywhere would find themselves accidentally pelted with stray tennis balls - which, when the innocent victim was bigger and older than the players, would often result in confrontation...