EDIT: The ghosts of Birmingham Past must have been feeling like a bit of fun, because when I was writing this post yesterday it suddenly vanished off my screen mid-type! I assumed it was a glitch and had just disappeared into nowhereland as sometimes happens when you are nearly at the end of a long email, or putting down a detailed forum-message, or that kind of thing ... funny that it is never right at the beginning!
But anyway, I didn't fancy starting it all over again straight afterward and got on with something else instead, and came back just now to do it ... and I found that as far as I had managed to get had been fired off and had landed on this thread after all without any help from me, not just glitched in to infinity ... those ghosts, no doubt!
So I've just taken a few moments to the rest that was intended and round it off tidily ... so, no you don't need to get your eyes checked because you seem to have entirely missed a part yesterday 
There were a number of different marble games, e.g.
1) In The Ditch, or Holey - getting it in to a hole in the fewest tries, the hole being one you made with a wallop of your heel if it was on soft ground, or whatever handy bit of surface damage there might be if it was hard like tarmac or slabs or whatever;
2) Closest To The Alley - a target marble, the Alley, pitched by the first player, who then got first try at getting next to it. A "toucher" was the winner, or the nearest after 5 tries and then you/they pitched again to set a new Alley and also take first try ... three touchers in a row that way ended the round of 5 games early, otherwise it was the most touchers over the full 5 games that won. If nobody got touchers the winner of the round was the one getting closest to the Alley and winning he most games like that. The prize was a marble off each of the other players.
3) Round The Town - mostly played in pairs and could be a winner-plays-winner series til there's one overall winner left. One of the pair starts by pitching their marble some shortish distance away, and from then on each person takes it in turn to aim for the other's marble. Hit it and win. No time limit, and you can go in any direction or just keep going "round the town" If it is was a knockout game whittling down from a few pairs to a single winner, the winner got the others' marbles.
4) Against The Wall - players took it in turns to decide on The Target: a wall, a gate, a grid if you were brave, and the person getting closest was the winner. Rinse and repeat til the bell goes for the end of playtime, and the winner is the one who got closest the most ... mostest!
... and numerous others.
But not so many "Jacks" games, also called "Fivestones", probably because you could play the games just as well with five stones instead.
The one that was played to death in the playground (not to THE death!) started with the set of 5 Jacks tossed down on to the ground and finish in a random pattern as they bounced and jinked around. The player then picked one up and had to toss it in the air and pick one of the other jacks up with the same hand and then also catch the other one in the same hand again as it fell back down.
Miss or drop either and you were out, but if you managed that okay you put the one back down and then repeated the last step but had to pick up two from the floor this time and still catch the other. If you managed that you went for three, and then four. The easy version was to pick all of them up, but one at a time - much easier if the group had scattered a little more widely when they landed.
Jacks was a game that easily transferred when you moved from junior to senior school at 11, however things got a little more interesting later-on when you dismissively looked down your nose at uncool "kids games".
Onesuch mover-upper game involved two people and a knife! Yup.
Actually, very harmless and required some degree of skill, and I never heard of any accidents fatal or otherwise
The two players stood facing each other about 4-5 feet apart, each with their feet together. It was a coin-toss or similar to decide who went first, and the aim was to throw the knife like a .. circus knifethrower, lol, though not at the other person which would have been far more interesting then the double-Maths after the break, but instead hoping to get it to stick in the ground a short distance to one or other side of them and they had to move their that-side foot to where it had stuck-in.
Then they had their turn and you had to move your foot accordingly, and so it carried on. The aim was to get the other person to stretch too far to be able to stand up without overbalancing, though you had to give them a chanced not just stick it ten feet over ... not very sporting behaviour!
There was a get-out, insofar as if one player was pretty much at full stretch they could get to stand up again and start afresh from there if they could throw the knife so that it stuck in the ground in an acceptably central position between their opponents already-open feet ... they couldn't just reach for an easier shot more toward their nearer foot, which if you were at full stretch and very wobbly was an infinitely easier throw than aiming another foot or two away, no pun intended.
It was great fun and could go on for quite a while, and like I said, there was a sporting element to it insofar as it was understood that there had to at least look like there was a chance of stretching to the new position, however at some point the difference between three inches and four would win you the match ...
I was actually familiar with handling knives from an early age and almost always had a sheath knife on my belt (ah yes, the old days when going out to play with friends consisted entirely of things that today would get you killed or taken away from your parents for your own safety, the uncaring, evil monsters!
But my Dad, the best one in The World, taught/took/showed me all sorts of interesting things, one of which was the fun you could have throwing knives properly and aiming for targets ... anything from an old tree stump to a discarded cigarette packet on the ground, to the coalhouse door ... and any of a thousand things he would set up in the garden for us to aim at.
So I found it a little strange that some of my schoolfriends couldn't get the knack of holding the blade and throwing it so that it rotated a time or maybe two to stick cleanly in the ground. Of course, once it started to sink in the game became more fun.
Then there was a day, about two months after "Splits" had already been an established and popular game with small groups of boys having fun playing it on the grassy areas at breaktimes and lunchtimes, when one of the Masters, robe a-billowing behind him, came hurrying purposefully and somewhat angrily out through the playground saying loudly to stop this dangerous game, asking whose idea it had been, didn't anyone have any sense, did we want somebody getting seriously hurt or worse ... you get the idea.
Given that it had been going-on very openly daily for a couple of months or more, I expect that a Parent had heard of it from their beloved child and saw a string of amputees in the future or something, so complained.
Interestingly, that same Teacher didn't have anything at all to say one snowy winter's day when a large snowman that was being built by a group of boys was actually becoming a female nude and in very fine detail ... he walked up to it, stood there looking at it for far longer than might have been expected for some reason, gave a smirk and carried on with his playground monitoring which somehow seemed always to bring him back to the sculpture after another 10 minutes or so, smirk included.
But that's quite a different kind of playground game ...
After all, you need to be sure a career is not really the one for you before you reject it.
