Box of Hats and Wigs

One of the best things about being a kid is that following trends isn’t frowned upon, rather it’s expected and even encouraged. You’re not going to be mocked for just liking something as it’s cool, rather you’ll get laughed at if you don’t. For me, it was Pokemon cards, but as far as I can tell there’s an even more ridiculous collectable for kids these days.

The “GoGos Crazy Bones” or whatever they’re called are small plastic figurines of various forgettable characters that nobody really cares about specifically. It’s like a new version of marbles, where you play against somebody else and if you win you get to take one of their marbles as a sort of pathetic trophy. It’s like agreed theft, there’s no real reason why they should take one.

Flatmate Scott brought a few of these figures back from work, and after trying to remember the ridiculous names the characters had (I’d say what they were, but they disappeared from my mind about 0.2 seconds after saying them) we decided to look up the rules of the game. A figure based combat game, accessible enough for kids, this could be mildly amusing for at least 10 seconds, right?

Uh, no. There’s a few variations on the rules for the game, but they all seem to revolve around the same principle… of throwing the plastic things at the floor, sometimes at other figures. It’s a game where you get points depend on how they land, or how they hit other people. This might sound silly, but personally if I was designing a game for kids, I wouldn’t make the fundamental rule of it being to throw plastic toys at each other. It seems a bit silly, and begging for bad things to happen. This was shown pretty well after me and Scott tried to play the main rules (where you get points on which way up it lands) but it degraded to throwing them quite fast down the corridor. They could probably hurt. At least that’d be entertaining though.

According to Wikipedia (so it’s obviously factually correct and not made up in the slightest), the game is based on a game played in an Ancient Greek book. So, when you see those blue plastic figures being flicked at each other, just think that playing with the Crazy Bones is probably the most that children will be immersing themselves in Ancient Greek culture.

You can also think that it’d be much more entertaining if they were using sheep’s knucklebones, as originally were used. That’d be so enjoyable to watch on the playground. I mean, watching people on the playground in a non-pedophilic way.