lately my kids have been playing Baby Knife, which consists of somebody acting as a baby with knife hands chasing people while going "baby knife baby knife" over and over. is this a thing or are they just insane
we have a new teacher this year who has never had kindergarten before & she rounded em all up & told em No Baby Knife and No Zombies and idk how to tell her that 1. all kindergarten recess games boil down to Give Birth And Kill Each Other and 2. the absurd vaguely inappropriate games they make up are usually better than when they try to play an Actual game like soccer
Baby Knife is straightforward. theres a baby knife. baby knife chases you. thats about it. when they try to play Real Sports every single child is playing by a different set of rules unbeknownst to the others and none of them are playing by the Actual rules. everybody is mad at everybody else and running up to tell on their colleagues for cheating every 3 minutes. this doesnt happen when they play Baby Knife
if no one's said it, it's normal. It's just Tag with flavor. Tag is boring so you gotta add imagination.
Our baby knife as kids was Raptor Tag. Raptors hunt in packs so the person who was "it" had to run around pretending to be a velociraptor and to tag people they had to actually tackle them and "eat" them for 5 full seconds (others could come to the rescue and save them in that time, but risked getting eaten too or instead if the raptor switched targets). Eaten players then became raptors, until the whole pack was teamwork-hunting the last wily or lucky kid. There were no winning survivors- the game was won as a group once everyone was a raptor.
My kindergarten played "wolves" where a pack of 4-12 children, usually all the girls, would try to chase down and "kill" the deer (usually me)
I was bulled extensively in elementary school, but 1. Mostly by my teachers and 2. Not during this, because we ALL had PBS Nature and as Deer, I was allowed to gouge, kick, bite, keep running even after being grabbed, or body-check the larger children into the picnic tables and other architecture.
You know, for realism.
In point of fact, I was usually The Deer because I was the best at evading/ not going down without a fight, whereas most boys would just start crying or tattle, which is no fun at all.
We were incredibly boring. We played "murder ball" which was just Capture the Flag over the whole school grounds (outdoors only) and violence was permitted using the ball.
#We played Leeches (people run past you and you grab their legs and make them fall)#And Roadkill (body-slam your friends to the ground)#The teachers did not like these games
Your school would've loved Get Down, Mr President
We played a version of freeze tag where when you were frozen you became a toilet and in order to be unfrozen someone would have to sit on you and then flush (ie use the toilet)
We had Military Dodge. I want to be clear, we were the type of kids who hated Dodge Ball in Gym - which we considered some state sanctioned torture - but Military Dodge was fun because it was our choice to play or not, but it absolutely was mechanically worse. This may have existed on other playgrounds too, I don't know.
Players put their backs to the wall of the school building with one person currently in charge of throwing the ball as hard as possible at someone on the wall (we all wanted to see a brief imprint of "tioV" on the skin). You could try to dodge it but you had to stay against the wall. Torso shots were an auto out. If they hit a limb, you tucked it behind your body as if you'd lost it in combat. This actually meant legs were a more fun target than going straight for the torso as then you got a few rounds were a target could take additional limb hits because dodging was so much harder. Last player standing got to be thrower next round.
Eventually it was declared by teachers that the balls could only be used for kickball, funnelball or four square.
But yes, children crave Bloodsport.
I don't recall inventing any games, but Red Rover was just an excuse to clothesline people or whip them to the ground as hard as you could. There were monkey bar wars, too. You'd start at opposite ends, then leg wrestle in the middle.
I invented a game called "magpie" and told the kids at my new school that it was from my old school. The game was to get to the other side of the field without getting nailed by the magpie that roosted there.
I won every single game because my mum was a teacher and I had to spend hours at school after it closed so I fed the magpies and they recognized me. I invented the game because I suck at running, sick of losing every game, and it was really fun watching kids that were mean to me get nailed in the back of the skull by my friend, the magpie.
We had "skinwoman" and the conceit was that the person who was It had to bodily drag you to the corner where the teachers couldn't see and then you would be skinned and made evil and thus have to also be It and help hunt.
we had 'alley soccer' which was soccer played with 20-40 kids all at once, almost every one of us with their own ball. one girl got a broken nose twice. after a few years of this, the school (which was not poor, it was just that it was a school And catholic church and the clergy preferred to put all donations into stained glass and ceiling murals) decided to build a small playground instead of making hordes of children play in a parking lot full of cars. they managed to ban king of the kill after a girl broke her arm (HER fault i maintain), but never quite beat alley soccer - at least before i left.
we also had The Hula Hoop Wars, which included body slamming a weak link to the ground and screaming LIVE BAIT LIVE BAIT and then leaving them on the ground and running away while someone with a hula hoop hit them repeatedly with the hoop and the rest of us got away (surprisingly, everyone got fairly regular turns at being live bait). iirc a boy also broke his nose playing this but that was because he tripped over a bike running away.
