“Let’s see what’s going on.” My big brother and I had a group of stuffed animals, a whole host of characters, and we treated them as if they were all living their own lives outside of our awareness. So I would turn to my brother and say “do you want to see what’s going on?” And we would play out complex soap opera scenarios with the toys, who all had jobs and families, relationships, and drama. We’d just drop in from time to time to catch up on the story. Good times.

Not to answer a question with a question but with all the constant stimulation do kids get bored enough to come up with their own games anymore?

We had a role-playing game we called Magic. Really it was just walking in the woods with sticks.

The stick: a nature’s original toy!

While driving, I’ll find a spot on the windshield and try to make it weave in and out of the center dotted lines by waving my head back and forth.

Your game sounds like a lot of fun!

As a kid I mostly played on my own (explained in adulthood with an autism diagnosis), but I did have a friend I would watch clouds with and we made up an ongoing story to go with what we would see. We also made “magic potions” from all of our parents cosmetics lol

At school we had the normal one group takes a high ground, the other is bellow, and everyone is throwing sticks and acorns and other plant matter at each other without any clear goal (to me, anyway), but I would back out of those pretty quickly haha

I did have a group of supposed friends start a d&d game once but even at the point of creating a character, every suggestion I made was mocked, and it was clear they didn’t want me there, so I didn’t go back which sucks, because I think I would have really enjoyed it (d&d in general, definitely not with them though)…

“Hunter.” The play area is a big part of the neighborhood. The details were a little variable depending on different experiments or how many people were playing, but one canonical version is three hunters with walkie-talkies, trying to find two people without walkie-talkies, with a time limit. No other rules aside from don’t piss off any neighbor inside their house overly badly.

A good solo game for long car trips was looking out the window riding an imaginary motorcycle. You can go up on power lines if there’s a slanted wire you could ride up, you can move left or right, but if you box yourself into a place where you’ll hit a vertical wall no matter what you do, you crash.

Various hallucinogenic DND-but-not-really variants played with no sourcebooks, and a piece of paper with a grid with numbers that you flick your pencil eraser at with your eyes closed to “roll dice.”

I used to use jenga pieces to build “ships” with one piece marked as brdige.

Then use another piece and flick it at the others ship to knock pieces lose.

Hit the bridge you won

“Day in the life of a dog”. A game where me and my brother would (you guessed it) spend an hour or two doing nothing aside from pretending to be a dog.

God to have that much free time now.

My friend and I loved playing make believe super heroes with our own madeup heroes. We made a whole xmen team, named Rainbow and his group. The leader was Rainbow. And he had a group. He could shoot rainbows. No one ever played as him as he was easily the weakest character in the group. Kids are hilarious.

I made a pretty cool desktop fantasy role-playing game. It had cardboard puzzle like pieces that could be patched together into a dirt of dungeon maze. So it has quite a few layout permutations.

I vaguely remember playing it with some friends a couple of times. And we all enjoyed it.

I actually still have the pieces. I found them a few years ago. But I don’t remember the rules at all, and I didn’t write them down. So I no longer have any idea how to play it!

We made up a few that were fun.

First was cowboy and Indian block fortress wars. I had a big set of wooden blocks, like leftover 2x4 and 2x2 actual lumber pieces among other pieces, and a set of plastic cowboys and indians. We would split the blocks up and each build a fort, then place our cowboys or indians at various spots on the fort. Then we would take turns throwing a block at the other person’s fort to make it fall apart and the plastic guys fall. Once you knocked all your opponent’s pieces off their fort you win.

I also had a big set of cheap Lego knock-offs, they weren’t hard like Lego, they had a bit of flex. We would build cars with them and we each got a certain number of wheels we could use. Then we would crash our cars together head-on, parts would go flying but they didn’t break like Lego would. After each crash we’d check to see that each car could still sit on the floor without any part of the body touching the floor, the wheels had to keep the car off the floor. If both were good we kept crashing them together until someone’s car lost enough wheels or parts that it was dragging the floor, then they lost.

And finally my friend’s house had a big carport with a flat metal roof on it, probably 20x40 feet. Over the carport was a gum tree, they drop pointy ball seeds a little smaller than a golf ball but not as hard, and the spiky points aren’t particularly sharp. There were thousands of them on the ground and roof. One of us would get up on the carport roof and the other would run around on the ground. We threw gumballs at each other and if the person on the ground hit the person on the roof we would switch places. Can’t believe neither of us fell off the edge of the roof. At one point we made a sort of hand-held catapult by nailing a plastic container to a ~3’ piece of 2x4 lumber, we’d fill the container with gumballs and fling them at the other person all at once. The person on the roof usually got that since they had less maneuver room up there.

Good times.

Another one from my childhood: “Get Out”

We’d split up the money from a set of Monopoly, and each person would get a room on one level of the house. First, we’d hide all our money in our respective rooms, and once you were ready, you’d raid other people’s rooms looking for their stashes. The main rule was, if the owner of the room was inside the room and said “Get Out” you had to leave. We’d sometimes make deals like “I’ll pay you $X for one minute in your room,” or we’d just try to be sneaky about it. Once you got some money from someone else’s room, you’d go back to yours and close the door to hide it. Whoever had the most money at the end won.

Caveat: your mom is less than happy finding Monopoly money throughout the house, as you’d invariably forget where you hid some.

My brother and I used to take ordinary household items and make an airplane out of them, competing who can go further (each would get 3 attempts, and the farthest flight is marked).

We started with gliders, but very quickly moved up to powered flights (rubber bands and improvised propellers). We had to stop with the powered flights because it got so far that we lost them.

We had carpeted stairs down to the basement. We would tuck our pants into our socks and butt slide down it.later we would land into a beanbag chair. Then we just started jumping into the beanbag chair. Tended to ruin those chairs pretty quickly, but we had fun and stayed out of Mom’s hair so…

Not sure if it counts, but there’s this game called Meme Uno.

We had a big overstuffed rocking chair. My sister would sit in the chair and I would put a pillow over my head and run at her like a head-butting dinosaur. I won if I knocked her chair over backwards, and she won if she managed to kick me enough to make me back off. I think she was eight and I was nine.

The downstairs neighbors must have loved this…