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World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

(www.theguardian.com)
424 points notamy | 5 comments | 15 Oct 24 03:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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zabzonk ◴[15 Oct 24 04:48 UTC] No.41845048[source]▶
When I was a kid (many years ago) me and a friend once went "conkering" down quite a posh road with several horse chestnut trees on it. We had collected a few good ones when a guy came out of his house and called us over. We thought "Oh dear, get off my lawn time", but no! He had big bin full of conkers that he had picked up from his garden, and invited us to choose from them.
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animal531 ◴[15 Oct 24 07:09 UTC] No.41845761[source]▶
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.

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zabzonk ◴[15 Oct 24 13:54 UTC] No.41848628[source]▶
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.

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1. aeneasmackenzie ◴[15 Oct 24 14:03 UTC] No.41848724[source]▶
Elaborate marble runs are very popular, although many people use steel balls instead.
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2. Loughla ◴[15 Oct 24 14:28 UTC] No.41849001[source]▶
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.

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3. buildsjets ◴[15 Oct 24 17:54 UTC] No.41851152[source]▶
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.
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4. grues-dinner ◴[15 Oct 24 19:40 UTC] No.41852329[source]▶
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.

5. animal531 ◴[16 Oct 24 06:24 UTC] No.41856135[source]▶
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.