It was an indescribable feeling when the close of school was drawning for virtually every child in the 80’s and 90’s. Homework was a ‘must’ but first, they had to play.

‘Chaskele’, ‘Pilolo’, ‘Kpiting3’ were a few of the games ruling at the time and hearing claps in or around the area was common because girls will happily be jumping around playing ‘Ampe’, after school or during the weekends.

These times are gradually fading out and being rapidly replaced by what they call the ‘modern’ way of having fun; computer games.

Today, games like FiFa, NBA, Call off duty, Mad Max, Need for speed, Assassin’s Creed, God of War, etc. have taken over and have got children in this age addicted.

GhanaWeb joins the world as it marks Universal Children’s Day today, to take a quick flashback into some traditional games that ‘indomie’ children may be missing on:

Pilolo

This outdoor game is mostly played by five or more children. With this game, there’s a leader who summons other team members to relay basic rules to them before he disperses them to go into hiding.

The team lead decides to hide the sticks under stones, on top of short trees or even leave them on the ground just in front of where the kids are waiting. After that process, the person shouts ‘pilolo’ and the others will have rush looking for the hidden ‘treasure’.

The smart one who finds the hidden treasure picks one, runs to a finishing point to hands it over to the leader whilst everyone watches on to see who will lose.

As the search is still on, the song which was mostly sang was ‘piloloo yaafo b3 mli’ – in the Ga parlance. This simply means "pilolo nobody is expected to cry".



Chaskele

To play Chaskele, you need crushed cans, stick, car tyre or a bucket if there’s no tyre available. A minimum of two players can start this game. As one poses as a defender, making sure the opponent does not throw the ball made of the crushed tin cans into the car tyre or bucket to win.

The defender, on the other hand uses a stick as a bat to bounce the ball from entering the bucket.

The opponents become the scorer if the ball manages to get into its post.



Table Football, popularly known as Casse or ‘Gabglo’

This table-top game is mostly played by two people irrespective of the gender. It involves a created football part on a large piece of wood with players carved from wood and connected to a knob. The aim of the game is to use the control knobs to move the ball into the opponent's goal. However, there are no unified rules for playing the game.



Zanzama

With this particular game, it takes a lot of courage, without which the players may likely back out.

Here, whenever a player wants to sit, he has to seek permission sort of from his colleague. Failure to do so attracts a knock on the head. Until the culprit says “Zanzama”, the other has the right to keep knocking him till he mentions the word.



Kpitinge

For players to enjoy this game, they needed to have a non-working pen case filled with sand with a broom tip, or a pen top with the edges of battery fixed around it. Then move on to mount sand and get ready to enjoy the game. Failure to get the pointed part of the pen-top in the sand will have you some slaps at the back of your hands.