Risk... we'd have all night games... that game could take forever. There's a great Eddie Izzard comment on risk about sitting on Australia and piling up the units - but anyone foolish enough to try and hold Asia...
I was born in 1970 - just to place me fairly squarely in the late 70's / early 80's timeframe for toys... I already mentioned the Star Wars toys - I still have the original 12 action figures in a case. They're well played with so not worth anything, but I kept them. Also kept a bunch of hot wheels and matchbox cars (maybe 30 of them) - tossed the totally trashed ones. I let nieces and nephews play with those.
Baseball cards - that was a fad in our neighborhood for a couple of years -and while I've never been a real sports fan - I do have the "collector" gene (or is it a defect?) in me so I had quite a few from like 1983 or 1984. My older sister's boyfriend donated all of his to me - so I have those. I had planned to give these to one or more of my nephews/nieces - but none of them got into collecting baseball cards so they're still sitting in my basement.
Started collecting stamps in like 2nd grade or so - and did it off and on for a few years... yeah - that collection is in the basement somewhere too. ha.
I think the video game / computer age was very prevelant for me and my neighbors... every year or so someone on the block got the "new" thing (or the 'new' thing that was a couple years old and price had come down... ha.) We had the Pong home console... later we got the Atari 2600 ( I think we were the 2nd on the block to get that - and everyone ended up with one eventually...). I later got a Tandy Color Computer 2 - which besides being able to write fantastic basic code and work with all of 8 colors (or was it 16?) - it played some neat games... I was addicted to Dungeons of Daggorath and just about any text adventure game. A neighbor also got the Coco2 and got baseball - we wasted a lot of time playing that.
Someone got an Intellevision - then my cousin got an Intellevision - always good when more than one person had it so game borrowing could happen...
Someone had a Vic 20 - and later a Commodore 64. Someone ended up with the bigger Atari 5200 I think... it wasn't that neat and we were starting to move on from video games by that point.
Of course - nice weather was all about outdoor games... even though I was an indoor sort of bookworm type / happy to pound away on the piano - I still loved to play football and stuff in the neighborhood.
kick the can / capture the flag ... I especially remember this fondly when I was a bit younger and there was that slightly older wave of kids in the neighborhood that soon grew out of kids games... we had like 14 people for those games at that time. A couple years later it was down to 6 to 8 of us so still fun... but getting fewer.
I also remember building trails in the woods for our bikes... and walking the creek all the way down from the Optimist Club to the highway which was a few miles and areas where the creek got deep. Biggest memory from that was being scared to death as we decided to climb up the hill out of the creek to walk a cornfield home and as we're climbing I realized there was a hole and the sun was shining into a cave or mine opening (lots of mines in the area) - holy cow... I moved fast to get to 'safer' ground.
...
A quick bit of 'context' I guess... I grew up in a ton of under a 1,000 people in central Illinois. We lived on 10th street which was the last street in town... so while we lived in town - I could see fields and woods.
Also - with the Atari and CoCo2... both of those presents were things where I learned a bit of negotiation early in life. I really wanted the Atari - so I propsed that it be for both Christmas and my birthday (which is in August) - and what's really cool of my parents is they actually held me to that... I didn't get anything but a token gift on my birthday those years.
(yeah yeah - it's goofy). I really did have good parents... I'm amazed they let me play 4 o'clock bars when I was 15... anyway... rambling over.
