Marbles were very popular during the depression. Marbles still are very inexpensive, and provide hours of enjoyment. Some city playgrounds organized tournaments with “ringer”: the most popular marble game.
Number of players: 2+ (although any more than six can get cumbersome)
Age: 5+
Space required: a six to ten foot circle, preferably on hard clay if outdoors, or carpet if indoors. Medium pile is best.
To set up, draw a 6-10 foot circle on the playing surface. This can be difficult, but not impossible indoors on carpet. The outside of the playing surface must be smooth, allowing marbles to pass out of the circle. Then, form a cross in the center of the ring using marbles. One in the center, and three each on each leg of the cross, with each marble roughly three inches away from the others.
To see who goes first, use a process called lagging. Draw a line, and then toss a marble a few feet away from the line. Each player then tries to come closest to the marble tossed. Whoever comes closest to the tossed marble gets to go first, and then play goes in order of distance from the first marble. A player may knuckle down on the lag, but could also bowl or loft their marbles. Only knuckling down is permitted beyond this point.
The goal of the game is to knock more marbles out of the ring than your opponents. Each player in turn knuckles down outside the ring line to knock the other marbles out. Players can shoot originally from any point around the circle line.
The player who knocks the marbles out gets a point for each marble. If the player successfully knocks a marble out, he gets to shoot again from the point at which the shooter stopped. If a player’s shooter goes outside the ring, the marble is placed at the ring line where it went out of bounds.
After a miss, the player picks up his shooter until the next turn, and at that point, may shoot from any point on the circle line.
The winner is the first player to get 7 marbles in a two person game, or if more are playing, the winner is the player who knocked the most marbles out of the ring.
If playing for “keepsies,” players decide ahead of time whether the winner will take all the marbles, or only those he knocked out.
There are lots of different variations of this game. Do you have a favorite marble game or variation of this traditional favorite? We’d love to hear about it!