The Games We Play

This year, Thanksgiving happens to fall just after the annual celebration of National Game and Puzzle Week (November 20-26). This is a perfect opportunity to peek into the American Folklife Center’s archives and learn about the many games that are documented in its holdings. With luck, you may stumble upon a new-to-you game that you can share with your family during the upcoming holidays.

Bingo

Bingo is well represented within AFC’s archival collections, including two large gatherings documented in the Lowell Folklife Project collection (AFC 1987/042) and the Italian Americans in the West Project Collection (AFC 1989/022). This version of bingo uses 75 numbered balls and randomized number cards. A caller sits at the front of the room and calls out the numbers over a loudspeaker. The game is easily adapted for family game nights, with several game companies offering at-home bingo sets, complete with cards, markers, numbered balls, and a rotating metal cage to help randomize the numbers.

If you want to create a more authentic feeling for your at-home bingo game, you can pull up this recording of a bingo hall in Lowell, Massachusetts and listen to the chatter as bingo players mill about the room waiting for the game to begin.

When the game finally starts (around the 9:30 timestamp), the noise in the hall dims to a murmur as the assembled crowd begin to pour over their strips of bingo cards. Whenever the crowd begins to get a little louder, the recording is punctuated by exasperated shushing and outbursts of “we won’t be able to hear that microphone!”

In addition to the traditional numbered version played in churches and casinos, there are other versions of the game available. I remember playing car bingo in my childhood, on long drives between Virginia and Ohio, and I’ve even made my own bingo cards for events like the Oscars. I recently saw a version intended for use while watching Hallmark Christmas movies. A few years ago, the Library created its own bingo-like cards for the 20^th annual National Book Festival. The festival was held virtually that year, due to the pandemic, but the Library encouraged parents and kids to participate at home in a “read across the Library” challenge. If bingo sounds like a fun addition to your family game night but you don’t want to purchase or make a 75-ball bingo set, you might consider making your own bingo cards, using the Library’s resources as an example.

Poker and other card games

Several card games can be found across a number of AFC field surveys. Poker is particularly well-represented, as played by the buckaroos of the 96 Ranch in this photograph from the Paradise Valley Folklife Project collection (AFC 1991/021)

and in this photograph of airmen playing poker near Versailles, France from the Joe Thompson Jr. Collection in the Veterans History Project.

The men depicted in the photographs from the Gilroy boccie club (from the Italian Americans in the West Project collection AFC 1989/022) are playing a card game called “Pedro.”

According to Pagat.com – a reference website for over 500 card games, maintained by card game researcher John McLeod – Pedro is a variation of the game “Pitch,” and has spawned a number of its own variants. The US version uses a standard 52-card deck, with the two two-person teams attempting to trick the other on each round. The first team to score 62 points wins.

In December 1996, Lyntha Scott Eiler and another fieldworker staying at Syble’s Bed & Barn were woken up by laughter and talking coming from the boarding house’s common room. Curious about the noise, they went to investigate and discovered several boarders playing a card game called “Pass the Trash.” From what I understand, there are two versions of “Pass the Trash.” One of these is a poker variant of five-card stud. The other is a simpler game where players are dealt a single card. In the recording from Syble’s Bed & Barn, one of the players explains “if you get a king, you flip it over, nobody can pass with you.”

This instruction, paired with the relative brevity of the round, leads me to believe the boarders are playing the one-card version of Pass the Trash. The rules are as follows:

• Each player starts with three quarters. Dealer deals a card to each player.
• Starting with the player to the left of the dealer: look at the card, decide whether to pass/keep.
  • Pass: player passes the card to the left
  • If player has a King, the card is flipped face-up on the table and it cannot be passed
• Play continues around the table with each player. When everyone has played, the dealer can choose to pass by taking another card from the top of the deck
• Everyone turns over their card to reveal the lowest card – player with the lowest card loses and forfeits a quarter

Puzzles
While sifting through the archival boxes that house the manuscript materials of the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project collection (AFC 1982/009), I stumbled across a small box with a handful of carved wooden shapes inside. The pieces are part of a wooden ball puzzle, made by Raymond Nichols and collected by Carl Fleischhauer during the field survey. Carl wrote the following in his fieldnotes:

“Mr. Nichols likes to make things out of wood. He has built sections of his house and furniture in it, including cabinets and a table or two. He and his son are presently rebuilding and converting a log tobacco curing barn into a little 16 ft. square log house on some of his son’s property. […] Mr. Nichols gave us a ball puzzle he makes with a pocketknife. He couldn’t remember exactly where he learned it. ‘Must have seen it somewhere when I was a boy.’”

The ball puzzle had been taken apart for storage, meaning taking a picture of the finished puzzle required me to re-assemble the pieces. I tried to put them together in the reading room but had no luck on that particular afternoon. I did manage to track down a video demonstration on YouTube later that evening, so there is hope that I might be able to piece the puzzle back together the next time I pull it out of storage.

Dominos

In the Asian American Pacific Islander miscellaneous community collection (AFC 2024/001), I found a box of dominos (complete with hand-written labels) and a set of instructions on how to play a Close-Open game called Kiano. The game uses 36 tiles, and includes three different levels of play: elementary, intermediate, and advanced.

Confession time: I am one of those folks who is absolutely terrible at figuring out new games from reading the instructions, and the rules included in this collection were no exception. Despite the game-maker’s assurance that this game is “the first stage for leading to harmony cooperation,” my fledgling attempts at puzzling through the game play were about to lead me away from harmony. I am sure that, given the opportunity, I would be able to figure it out by watching other people, but for now I am going to have to give these instructions a blank stare and hope that anyone reading this is able to figure out the game on their own. If you consider yourself a gaming afficionado and would like to try your hand at this game, I encourage you to schedule a visit to the American Folklife Center reading room to view the instructions.

Children’s Games

Ghost in the Graveyard
Back in June 2024, the Center participated in the Library’s Family Day event. In addition to bringing examples of children’s games and songs found in our archival and reference collections, AFC staff asked visitors to share their favorite schoolyard games. That was my first introduction to a game called “Ghost in the Graveyard,” which seems to be a combination of hide-and-seek and tag. I was excited to find an example of this game in AFC’s “games” subject file.

One player is chosen to be the Ghost and a location is designated as Home Base. The Ghost covers their eyes and begins counting while the other players hide. Once the time is up, the Ghost begins searching for the hidden players. When someone is found, the Ghost yells out “Ghost in the Graveyard” and both the Ghost and discovered player race back to Home Base. If the Ghost makes it back to Home Base first, the other person is now the Ghost.

El Florón
I found this children’s circle game in a printed booklet titled “Juegos De Mi Isla (Games From My Island),” also housed in the games subject file. It requires a blindfold and a small object that can be held in the hand. Players arrange themselves in a circle, shoulder to shoulder. One player is chosen as “It,” and is then blindfolded and positioned in the center of the circle. The children begin singing and pass the small item – the “florón” – from person to person, behind their back. When the song ends, the It removes their blindfold and tries to guess who is holding the florón. If they do not guess correctly, the group challenges them to perform an activity, and they continue to be It for the next round. If they guess correctly, the person holding the florón becomes It.

Socks Game
Another game included in the subject file came from Friends Academy, a Quaker school in Southampton, New York. Players remove their shoes and sit on the ground, where they try to remove socks from other people’s feet. They are allowed to scoot around on their hands, but the instructions do not include any other rules. The last person with a sock on wins. According to Molly McCall, who contributed the game, “at first, people just sat there – and then it got really vicious.”

These three games are only a small sampling of the many children’s games that can be found throughout the Center’s collections. A recent research guide on Children’s Songs and Games provides links to some of these collections, as well as handy tips for finding more. In addition to archival collections, visitors to the AFC Reading Room can also access books in AFC’s reference collection relating to children’s games.  Many of these games – such as the hand-clapping games depicted above – require little to no additional equipment and can be introduced quite easily to your rotation of games.

More Resources
For more blog posts on games and puzzles:

• Kids Explain Their Rhymes, Games, and Songs by Stephanie Hall (June 5, 2020) from Folklife Today
• Folklife, Videogames, Cosplay, and More by John Fenn (May 8, 2024) from Folklife Today
• Sports in the Collections of the American Folklife Center by Doug Peach (August 14, 2023) on Folklife Today.
• Free Puzzles Through Chronicling America: Maze Edition Malea Walker (July 7, 2020) from Headlines & Heros: Newspapers, Comics and More Fine Print
• “Heaps of Fun”: Games, Rhymes, and Riddles in the Library’s Collections by Mara Gregory, reposted on Teaching with the Library: Primary Sources & Ideas for Educators

Visit the following sites for more information on other game-related collections at the American Folklore Center:

• Children’s Songs and Games: Resources in the American Folklife Center – research guide
• The Capital Pool Checkers Club: Tradition, Competition & Community in Washington DC – Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture by Peggy Fleming, alongside Georgetown University historian Maurice Jackson and members of the checkers club

Check out these digital resources from the Library of Congress to learn how to play poker and other card games:

• The game of draw power (published in 1887)
• The gentlemen’s handbook on poker (published 1892)
• Hoyle’s standard games (published 1924) – includes instructions for card games such as hearts, euchre, whist, pinochle, and cribbage, as well as instructions for mah-jongg, chess, checkers, and dominoes.

Browse the Free to Use and Reuse: Games for Fun and Relaxation resources assembled by the Library