3 CHILDHOOD GAMES

Everybody must have their own favourite childhood games. Today, I would like to share about my favourite childhood games. There is a lot of childhood games that I remember until now such as ‘Batu Seremban’, ‘Conquer’, ‘rubbers’, ‘Requires’, ‘Police & Thief’,’Under the Rainbow’ , ‘Lompat getah’ , ‘congkak’ and so on. 

When I was in primary school, my friends and I usually played “Batu Seremban”.But, sometimes, the boys surprised us with their hidden talents. Well, not so much “hidden” talents if they just had bigger hands. The idea of is to throw one “stone” up while scooping up as many of the remaining ones before catching the one that was thrown. Most of the time, it’s a quiet game-save for when you’re showing off “patting” tricks and slamming the table while you’re at it. The game requires a lot of speed and agility, and maybe some pretty homemade “stones” too. Two or more players can play this game. Sometimes it’s every person for himself, sometimes there are two teams. The five ‘stones’ are essentially tiny bags of cloth containing rice, sand or saga seeds. These are thrown and caught according to a fixed set of patterns. There are eight stages to ‘complete’ the cycle to get ‘1 point’. The player or team with the most points at the end of the game wins.

‘Conquer’ is olso one of my childhood games that I loved the most. This is super boy-centric but I played it sometimes. Yet another modern classroom game, based on the traditional Japanese board game, “Go”. Mathematics exercise books with gridlines are used to play this game, where two players take turns drawing their selected symbol to surround the other player’s unit. When you see 2 kids huddled around a Mathematics exercise book, trus me when I say that they’re not exactly discussing homework. “conquer” was , for its time, a modern classroom game . Pretty much an early version of a strategy game – one of the world’s simplest, if you asked me. But not always easy to play.


No one seems to know how the name came about, but this game seems to have gained popularity from the 1990s onwards. I remember it to be quite painful sometimes, even. Standing in a ring, players chant “Pepsi-Cola!” and jump apart. Taking turns, players must try to kick the foot of another player who tries to dodge him, eliminating each other until one winner remains. Rest assured, most kids have failed to “walk out” of this game with clean Bata shoes. I can’t say that Moms were pleased with end result of “Pepsi-Cola”.

-NASRIAATUL NATASHA BINTI MOHAMMED