Five Stone Game

How often do you get to hear “I didn’t need a Nintendo DS to be entertained when I was a kid! No, I used sticks and stones!” from older people around you?
Yup, I heard that from my dad not too long ago. I tried hard not to roll my eyes when he made that comment. I decided to check out how many games could be played with sticks and stones and entered “stone game” in to my trusted Google search engine since he wasn’t the first one who said that.
The first link that popped up was a post on how to make a ‘Five Stone’ game on the Zakka-Zakka blog - http://blog.zakka-zakka.com/make-your-own-five-stones-a-traditional-game.html.
(What a neat blog with tons of ideas. It hasn’t been updated in a while with the last entry dating 1 Oct 08. However it is full of inspiration and ideas and worth a visit!)

Back to the Five Stone game: You basically make five little bags filled with rice. Very simple, very fast. It takes very little fabric – scraps are probably best! The tutorial is very easy to understand with lots of pictures guiding you from one step to another.

The rules are just as easy to understand. Here are the rules that we are playing by: The first player starts the game by throwing the five bags on the ground and then picking up one of them.
Using only one hand, the player throws the bag up in the air, picks up one bag and then catches the bag with the same hand before it hits the ground. The bag is then put into the other hand. This is repeated until all the bags have been picked up. The player then throws the bags back on the floor and starts again, but this time, two bags must be picked up each time. This continues on except for the third round, when obviously, first three bags and then only one bag is picked up. Once all bags have been picked up in the fourth round successfully, the player starts again by going back down.
When the player misses the ball or does not manage to pick up the required number of jacks, the turn immediately finishes and the next player has a try. The player who manages to progress furthest in the sequence of throws wins.

There are many variations on it and you can adapt them easily. I do have to admit though that the rules that we found calls for people standing. We tried that a few times and failed miserably. We couldn’t even get passed the first round. So now we sit on the floor ☺
The game is addicting! Everyone who has played with us ended up requesting a set for their personal use. I have made 12 sets already and given them away to very happy kids.