Most cultures have played some sort of game where you roll rocks or pebbles or bones and pick a winner and a loser from where the projectiles end up. The same playful impulses that are behind marble games drive us to gamble on dice, divine the future from chicken bones, and pitch pennies. Americans played versions of marbles as early as the Colonial Period, usually with stone or clay balls as opposed to today's smooth glass ones. But it was in Urban America, in the first half of the 20th Century, that marbles became a fixture in the toy collection and game repertoire of almost every boy and girl.
Most kids get their first bag of marbles before they can appreciate the power of the little Aggies (a nickname that refers to the use of Agate in their production). At three or four years old, marbles are shiny and pleasingly smooth to the touch. Somewhere in second or third grade, the innocent marble collector wanders into a high-stakes game -- a dozen or so boys, maybe a couple of girls, circled tight around the marble arena they have scrawled in the schoolyard dirt. It will take the wide-eyed voyeur days, maybe even weeks, to muster up the courage to bring their treasured marble bag -- a treasured Christmas present, no doubt -- out to recess. They'll be welcomed with open arms -- fresh meat, after all -- and treated like a patsy until they figure out how to roll and hop a marble with sharpshooter precision.
There's plenty of debate on how best to launch your marbles. Standard practice dictates that the shooter rests the knuckle of their first finger on the ground, props the marble there, and propels with a flick of the thumb, a digit undervalued in every other American sport. Serious players boast a variety of shots to fit any situation.
Most of these kids are playing Ringer, or just plain Marbles, the pure free-for-all marble game, in which each player attempts to knock opponents' marbles out of the ring without their own Shooter (the Big Bullies of marbles, usually highly-prized and harder to find) leaving the ring. Kids have been as inventive with variations of marble games as with homework excuses. Some of the more noteworthy games include Bombsies, Poison, Chase, Castle, and Line. The simplicity of the names remind us that at the heart of any game of marbles is one goal -- smack the other guy's marble as loudly and solidly as possible, scoop it up, and add it to your collection.
Go To Page: 1 2
