Floor Games | Page 4

Games, But Very LIttle Of War Games

Section I THE TOYS TO HAVE
The jolliest indoor games for boys and girls demand a floor, and the
home that has no floor upon which games may be played falls so far
short of happiness. It must be a floor covered with linoleum or cork
carpet, so that toy soldiers and such-like will stand up upon it, and of a
color and surface that will take and show chalk marks; the common
green- colored cork carpet without a pattern is the best of all. It must be
no highway to other rooms, and well lit and airy. Occasionally, alas! it
must be scrubbed--and then a truce to Floor Games. Upon such a floor
may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping
boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of
spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The men of
tomorrow will gain new strength from nursery floors. I am going to tell
of some of these games and what is most needed to play them; I have
tried them all and a score of others like them with my sons, and all of
the games here illustrated have been set out by us. I am going to tell of
them here because I think what we have done will interest other fathers
and mothers, and perhaps be of use to them (and to uncles and
such-like tributary sub-species of humanity) in buying presents for their
own and other people's children.
Now, the toys we play with time after time, and in a thousand
permutations and combinations, belong to four main groups. We have
(1) SOLDIERS, and with these I class sailors, railway porters, civilians,
and the lower animals generally, such as I will presently describe in
greater detail; (2) BRICKS; (3) BOARDS and PLANKS; and (4) a lot
of CLOCKWORK RAILWAY ROLLING-STOCK AND RAILS. Also
there are certain minor objects--tin ships, Easter eggs, and the like--of
which I shall make incidental mention, that like the kiwi and the
duck-billed platypus refuse to be classified.
These we arrange and rearrange in various ways upon our floor,
making a world of them. In doing so we have found out all sorts of
pleasant facts, and also many undesirable possibilities; and very
probably our experience will help a reader here and there to the former

and save him from the latter. For instance, our planks and boards, and
what one can do with them, have been a great discovery. Lots of boys
and girls seem to be quite without planks and boards at all, and there is
no regular trade in them. The toyshops, we found, did not keep
anything of the kind we wanted, and our boards, which we had to get
made by a carpenter, are the basis of half the games we play. The
planks and boards we have are of various sizes. We began with three of
two yards by one; they were made with cross pieces like small doors;
but these we found unnecessarily large, and we would not get them
now after our present experience. The best thickness, we think, is an
inch for the larger sizes and three-quarters and a half inch for the
smaller; and the best sizes are a yard square, thirty inches square, two
feet, and eighteen inches square--one or two of each, and a greater
number of smaller ones, 18 x 9, 9 x 9, and 9 x 4-1/2. With the larger
ones we make islands and archipelagos on our floor while the floor is a
sea, or we make a large island or a couple on the Venice pattern, or we
pile the smaller on the larger to make hills when the floor is a level
plain, or they roof in railway stations or serve as bridges, in such
manner as I will presently illustrate. And these boards of ours pass into
our next most important possession, which is our box of bricks.
(But I was nearly forgetting to tell this, that all the thicker and larger of
these boards have holes bored through them. At about every four inches
is a hole, a little larger than an ordinary gimlet hole. These holes have
their uses, as I will tell later, but now let me get on to the box of
bricks.)
This, again, wasn't a toy-shop acquisition. It came to us by gift from
two generous friends, unhappily growing up and very tall at that; and
they had it from parents who were one of several families who shared
in the benefit of a Good Uncle. I know nothing certainly of this man
except that he was a Radford of Plymouth. I have never learned nor
cared to learn of his commoner