Games Maltese People Played As Kids That Were Dangerous AF

Every generation thinks the ones younger than theirs has it way easier than they ever did – and while that’s not always the case, looking back on some of the rougher games we used to play, Maltese children certainly did live more dangerously in the 80s and 90s.

Here’s a few games that would not fly in 2018.

1. Dodgeball ft. hunters’ bullets

Remember running through fields, picking up actual bullet’s cases and chucking them at your friends while giggling gleefully? Yeah, imagine doing that now. What’s ever worse was finding them while they were ‘still warm’ was even more exciting.

2. Bloody knuckles ft. LM1

An international phenomenon in schools, Bloody Knuckles involved flicking a coin into a friend’s fist to do as much damage as possible. The first person to chicken out after bleeding loses – sounds bad enough.

Now imagine playing it with what was probably the heaviest coin in the world, the lira. Goodbye knuckles.

3. Fort hunting ft. unstable buildings

No trip to the countryside was complete without a scramble to the top of a collapsing girna, or (if you could give your parents the slip), a trip through the window of one of the pillboxes found around the island. 

They seemed low enough at first, but what we often forgot is that they were at least one storey deeper than the soil level, and were a ‘Timmy stuck in a [Maltese version of a] well’ situation waiting to happen.

4. Classroom boredom ft. sharp stationary 

From fountain pens to scissors, kids left alone for long enough would always end up playing some variation of the ‘Five Finger Fillet’ – aka stabbing sharp objects in the spaces between your fingers.

5. Races at Nanna ft. lots of glass

Relay races with your cousins were fun. Relay races when you had to tap on the glass door at the end of Nanna’s corridor were a trip to hospital waiting to happen.

6. Semi-permanent tattoos ft. a compass

There was always that one kid pressuring the others to try it – and for some reason, most of us did. Whether we scratched our own name, or the name of our crush, everyone remembers what the soft white mark and the following redness looked like when trying to do this.

We also remember the panic when first drawing blood and the fear of lead poisoning if the pencil came anywhere near the wound.

7. Ċama Ċama ft. everything our parents were scared of by the sea

The game was simple, line up by the sea, jump in and call out a name on your way down. Now it was their turn to do the same.

While the premise is easy enough, as the game got more and more heated kids would run up the algae-covered, slippery stairs to make it in time. They’d jump recklessly without watching out for the depth. They’d do a ‘bomba‘ over (and onto) their friends. Literally everything our parents warned us not to do.

Tag the people you used to play these with

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