World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

He probably played it himself back in the day.

Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.

Things from my youth, as well as conkers:

- marbles (can you get them anymore?)

- kick the can (where would kids get cans today?)

- British bulldog/chain tig (far too dangerous)

I can't remember the rules of these, but they were very popular in the early 1960s, when I played them.

Elaborate marble runs are very popular, although many people use steel balls instead.

Marble runs are wildly different from marbles we played when I was a kid.

One is an engineering (lite) exercise, the other is a game of vague dexterity to take someone else's marble collection.

Marbles is played sitting in the dirt around a circle. There are no runs involved, and nothing is elaborate. The objective is to take your opponent's mables, permanently, by knocking them out of the circle. Using steel balls to play would be completely pointless and it would ruin the entire game. I want to take your cool looking hazel cat's eye, not a random steel ball that looks just like all the other steel balls.

I bet all are alive and well in other countries.

> marbles (can you get them anymore?)

Almost literally never been cheaper. Under £3 for 50 on AliExpress, free shipping if you buy 150. I don't know if a child gets or loses street cred for having more cheap marbles then you can physically carry in 2024, but they could acquire that many quite easily.

> where would kids get cans today?

Pretty sure cans still exist! They might be a little more likely to contain, say, organic chopped tomatoes now than some gruesome 60s spam creation, but they're still a thing.

Ah you see, it's all about how much your opponent values the marbles. Marbles might be pretty dead, but there have been a hundred other trading games, with more or less the same conceit of some contest for acquisition of the opponents item. Marbles didn't have strong enough marketing (by who, the British Marbles Board?) to beat out the more modern crazes that laser-focused on kid's psyches. I don't know when they started doing that, but at least by the 90s which were rife with branded crazes that absolutely short-circuited young brains, and it's continued to now.

I remember football stickers bring banned on day 1 of term, having blown up over summer because someone stole a huge stack from a locker. Presumably the 90s ish was when the Made in Taiwan plastic crap availability really started to make that stuff cheap and fast enough to churn out in huge volumes to start a craze in weeks. Compared to marbles where a collection might represent years of growth, overall marble-econony production being trickled in by kids buying or being gifted just a handful at a time.

> Almost literally never been cheaper. Under £3 for 50 on AliExpress,

Oh, good to know.

Back when I played the most prized ones were steel ball bearings, which the NCO engineers filched them from the RAF Vulcan bombers. Us flight officers kids didn't get access to this stuff.

Somewhat interesting factoid (so I am told - be interested to see a real source), ball bearings were packed into the RAF nuclear weapons to prevent horrible accidents if the aircraft crashed (which quite a few did) - tales of crew skidding around on the tarmac after the balls were dumped after arming the weapon were not unheard of, but probably legend.

This one in particular has mostly died - schools don't like it & children otherwise don't play outside as much.

Here in South Africa marbles are still very much available at any toy store. The colours and different sets you can get now are so much better and varied than back in my day in the mid '80s.

The actual games played with marbles is pretty varied. The local one that we had would have you put a marble a bit in front of your ankles, with your heels making a 90 degree angle. Then the other player would shoot at it from some distance away.

That variant was also a gambling type where you could win or lose. The shooting marble was often a metal ball, but the ones you wagered were the nice ones that everyone was after.

> "Somewhat interesting factoid (so I am told - be interested to see a real source), ball bearings were packed into the RAF nuclear weapons to prevent horrible accidents if the aircraft crashed"

My imagination couldn't conceive of a logic behind this (nor could GPT-4, which told me you were talking nonsense), so in case anyone else comes across this and has the same curiosity:

Apparently "the ball bearings were introduced to increase the density of the core, preventing it from being compressed into a critical shape by an accident such as a plane crash", with the balls being removed as part of the arming the weapon ready to be dropped.

Wikipedia has a brief mention and a diagram here, though with "citation needed": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_design#Warhea...

edit: And also there's "Aircraft engines must not be run with Violet Club loaded on the aircraft with the safety device [of steel balls] in place. The engines must not be started until the weapon is prepared for an actual operational sortie [to prevent the steel balls vibrating like a bag of jellybeans]." which does have a couple of apparent sources cited, though not clickable ones that are easy to look up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Club#Controversy