Fun games for big kids

I don't think there was a huge gap in my life between when I laid to rest childish games and when I eagerly picked them back up. I was a freshman in high school when I bought a Thomas the Tank Engine lunch box in order to entice my younger brother into giving me his Mickey Mouse head lunch box - I was never a big Mickey fan but the lunch box was shaped like his head - a decapitated Mickey to shove my sandwich in was just too good to pass up!

My friends and I took off from there: playing in puddles, late-night games of Calvinball (from Calvin and Hobbs, where you make up rules as you go), and, my personal favorite, school-wide games of duck duck goose where we felt free to tag and run from people who had no idea a game was going on.

Then a couple of years ago, the movie Dodgeball came out and there was an explosion of adults revisiting the games of their childhood. Salon.com has a great piece about it today, focusing in part on a game I'd love to see happen in Greensboro: StreetWars, a watergun assassination tournament where you get targets and enough info to stalk them and "kill" them with watergun fire. People go to crazy lengths to get their pray; it even caught the attention of CSI:NY in which the DB had an office with interchangeable decor, depending on the target at hand.

That's my challenge to you, my loyal reader - bring StreetWars to Greensboro and I might take mercy on you if you're my target. But probably not.