Forefinger Flick Games, etc.



Well, I have your attention.

 I love playing games…seems like I have loved playing games forever. I was always compiling statistics (stats) of every game I played as a kid, and grew up playing everything I could physically play. I also played dozens of other games too, with cards, or boards, or both. Some with "armies" or men, or pieces, and some with houses, hotels, a racing car and a top hat. There were games with just pips and bids, with some of those later on involving dollars, big and small. 

In later years, different games were played, like choose the best sister, of the two above, on the right, but that's a story for another day.  Sorry if I have misled you, but I kept stats on stuff like that too.

I kept the statistics for every Thanksgiving Day touch football game my two older male cousins and I would play against my dad, uncle, and sister for a number of years, starting when I was about 7 years old.

I threw a ball against a rock wall in front of my house for years and years, refining my control by throwing a variety of "pitches" to a ‘strike zone’ that I had lightly painted on the wall. (the 'strike zone' is till there, though we moved out of the house in 1971)  I kept stats on how many strikeouts I’d have in a game, then figured I’d thrown a shutout with 14 K’s, or maybe even a no hitter? Then, I’d go write the numbers down, have some cold water, and go pitch another game, after a brief chat with my mom to update her on the stats.

In time, my best friend Bill would join me, and we’d work shortstop-to-first base plays, refining our glove work, as the wall had some oddly pointed rocks in some areas and could create ground ball or line drive havoc. We never knew if a carom might send the ball through or over the infield and out onto the Saw Mill River Parkway, and bash a car?

There were no video games when I was a kid, so being a sports fanatic I created a hockey game using nickels as players, and a dime as a puck. I played on a trapezoidal shaped end table we had in our house. It had a inward, beveled edge, so the coins wouldn’t scatter off the "rink." I Scotch taped tiny pieces of paper with abbreviated hockey positions on each coin, because I had to know if it was Stan Mikita or Bobby Hull who had scored the goal for the Chicago Black Hawks…for the stats, or course. I’d flick the players into the puck at an angle to try and score by using the fore finger or middle finger off the thumb technique.



It's up, and it's...

 It was the same finger flick we all know from playing a type of football game on school cafeteria tables. The game entailed having three flicks at a straw or piece of folded paper to get the end of the straw/paper to hang over the edge of the table for a touchdown -- and then "kicking" (by finger-flicking) all those extra points or field goals through your opponents goal post thumbs with another flick.



I thought the hockey game with the movable players shooting a real "puck" was one of the great toy inventions of the 1950’s. It may well have been, because they are still being sold, and it’s still a great game.

Steven, my best friend when I was 6 years old had Electronic Football, which was really stupid. I knew, even as a 6-year old that all those jizz-jazzing men vibrating and zigzagging all over the field was dumb. What was that all about?

I had something called Mag-Power Football, where each player used two magnetic wands under the table to move two men (of 11) at a time by "dragging" them with a magnetic tug. It was a major cluster every play, as like water polo, it was too easy to jab your opponent accidentally with a wand, whack his wand off the player he was trying to move, or tip the light-weight playing field over if things were going against you.


This game is dumb


A better game was something called Football Strategy, where offense got to call plays from a chart of 60 or more plays (not including punts and field goals), and the defense could call one of 10 defensive formations. Each play had a time assigned to it, and a clock that you would dial to the decreased time remaining. The game had a play called the Razzle Dazzle, which could gain you 44 yards, or lose you 14 yards and a fumble, or any of 8 variations in between, depending on the defense your opponent called. I don’t see the old Razzle Dazzle that much any more. I think Bill Walsh killed it?

My first great baseball (board) game was Ethan Allen’s ALLSTAR Baseball. Did anyone else have this game, or play it? You got Hall of Fame players from each league with their career statistics represented proportionally on discs of paper that fit over a spinning dial. Using that same flick, you’d spin the dial and just like Wheel of Fortune, see where the arrow pointed. It’s a collector’s item now – wish I still had mine.



Ethan Allen played MLB




Bop Baseball

 I received one of the greatest Christmas presents in my life one year when my parents bought me a game called Bop Baseball. This involved a pivoting bat someone could use either left or right-handed, and a competitor pitching a small wooden, donut-shaped "puck" by sliding it (quickly or slowly) towards the hitter. There was a little chime that served as an strike zone/umpire, and a "ching" strike three was very cool, if you were pitching. The field had a number of circles on the board, and when the ball/puck was struck by the batter, and the puck landed inside of a circle on the field, the hitter would get the result indicated inside the circle. It could be a single to homerun. If the ball/puck landed outside of a circle, the batter was out. It was a great game, and my cousin Donnie and I played hundreds of games of Bop Baseball. I kept stats for all the games.

In the NYC area growing up, there was a goofy game broadcast on TV on Saturday mornings for a while called Bottle Cap Baseball. It was a real TV show with two kids competing in a game where again they were using the basic "finger flick." This game sort of combines my hockey game with Bop Baseball. I could describe it for another 100-1000 words without really capturing the essence of it. The fact is that it was an actual show with two 13-year old boys flicking little discs around some representation of a baseball field that had been painted on a glossy piece of plywood! This was really on TV in the NYC area back then.   Oh yeah,  New York sophistication.

Unbelievable to consider that show now, in 2011, but it was almost the kind of thing ESPN first covered 30 years ago? Remember those professional miniature golf matches they aired back in the day?

Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, indeed! Where was Bottle Cap Baseball?



Still the best ever

 Then, in 1965 when I discovered Strat-O-Matic Baseball (SOM), I felt I had been admitted to heaven on earth. SOM is to Ethan Allen ALLSTAR baseball as chess is to checkers.

Another statistic driven game with the player’s stats being on "computer" cards is APBA, which I always thought a poor runner up to SOM. I’d bet that Bill and I played close to 400 SOM games against one another as teenagers, and another 500 to 1000+ on our own. The game is still alive and well today, about 48 years after it’s launch, and better than ever in many ways. I still have my cards from the 1969 MLB season – Let’s Go Mets!

Then, at some point in the 1960’s or 1970’s, a few people got together and created what we now know as fantasy baseball, which bred all the other fantasy games millions of people play year round.

An obvious reason why fantasy sports has become enormously more popular than even the best of the board games is that someone else will compile the stats for you. There’s that and it’s also possible (and even likely) that you’ll be playing with 12 people from any age group, disparate geographic location, sex, nationality, and socioeconomic position. You play them as equals in a league competition largely dependent on knowledge of the sport, or tons of luck, or a mix of both, if one is to succeed.

Bill and I largely re-discovered our old friendship in part because of a love of baseball, and the game of fantasy baseball. We also still engage in a game of Whiffle Ball home run derby when we are able. We bet beers and forget who won, so we just pitch, swing, sweat, and have cold beers.
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I now know people in California, Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont that I compete against regularly. Some I have never met, but I consider them friends.

My arthritic fingers are not so good for the same kind of finger flicking any more anyway, but I can still type in line up changes,and I have found other (more creative?) uses for my fingers.

Either way, the beer is still cold, I don’t have to keep the stats anymore, and playing games is still a lot of fun.