In which I can't find a good way to spell "One'er."
I'm getting a little old these days and when I talk to people even a few years younger than me, it seems like maybe I was in one of the later generations playing marbles at school. If you didn't play marbles, then you wouldn't be aware of what a complicated game it was. I have no idea whether the game still looks like this at all, if it is even played, and I figured it might be fun to document it, at least as it was played in Surrey in the mid eighties. A little bit of playground anthropology, if you will, built on my recollections which are doubtless flawed but I was very enthusiastic about marbles so I remember way more detail than I can ever use.
The basic game of marbles works like this: You roll your marble, your opponent rolls theirs, if you hit your opponents marble with your marble you win, which means you get to keep their marble, unless you're playing a friendly game for practice.
Within this basic framework was an wide selection of rules, for example - not all marbles are equal. Your basic marble was an Ordinary, which is the classic clear glass with with a coloured ripple through the centre. Any totally clear marble was a Pure, I remember that I had an amber orange pure tinged with red that we called a Blood Pure and I'm sure other colours would also get fanciful names from time to time. A white marble with coloured bands was a Queenie, a black marble with coloured bands was a Pirate, a black marble with speckles on the surface was a Galaxy. Sometimes these would be combined so you might have a Galaxy Pure or a Blue Pirate and so on; some marbles had an oily sheen and those would be an Oily [type]. Marbles also came in different sizes - the small ones we called One'ers, larger ones were Eighters and the biggest regular marbles were Twelvers. I have no idea where these numbers came from- an Eighter was probably twice the diameter of a One'er. Sometimes you would get intermediate sized marbles that we agreed were Fourers, Sixers, and so on. Ballbearings also existed on this scale and someone once showed up with a tractor bearing that must have been a Twenty-er - very high value.
The importance of these different types was that it created a disparity in value, which meant in your game, if you had a low-value marble (the lowest was a One'er Ordinary) then you would have to hit your opponent more times before you won, whereas they could hit your marble once and win. So your One'er Queenie versus my One'er Ordinary would be "twice once", a Pirate or Oily Pure might be "three times once" - I would have to hit your marble three times while you could hit my marble once and win. I definitely lost marbles at those odds, but I don't think I often won them. Come to think of it, this might be where the numbered names came from - the standard would be that a One'er would have to hit an Eighter eight times and so on - I don't recall well enough to be able to say. The other factor that could impact a marble's value was condition- normally an Eighter would be way more valuable than a One'er but if it was chipped that might bring the value down a lot.
Once you had agreed to play there was a very set formula to starting a game. You agreed the number of hits in each direction, what was in the game, the essential tip/vs hit and hits first go decisions and then tapped your marbles together the number of times you each had to hit the other. Thus was the contract made.
The vanilla starting point was "nothing in it" which meant that you played the game as described above, but there were a lot of things that could be in it:
- Rolls-on rebound meant if your marble bounced off something, you could roll it on.
- Rolls-on hit meant if you hit your opponents marble you could roll on straight away, which was pretty much essential if you wanted to have a chance in a game where you had to hit their marble multiple times and they had to hit yours once. In a roll-on it was generally agreed you couldn't hit your opponent's marble again, but I feel as though there might have been an option to have it so you could hit on a roll-on. I can't remember the title, if there was.
- Bombsies were a weird addition where you could walk over and drop your marble on your opponent's marble. This negated a lot of careful manoeuvring but was surprisingly often invoked and used. The call could also explicitly be "No bombsies."
- Dartsies meant instead of rolling your marble you could throw it like a dart, again you could also insist on the negative.
- Tips a hit meant that if your marble gently touched your opponent's marble it would count as a hit, otherwise you needed to hit hard enough to knock them from their position. This was usually in play.
- No hits first go meant that you couldn't immediately hit your opponent's marble on the first roll, this was almost always in play.
I daresay there were more, but those are the ones I clearly remember using. Once you agreed to the rules they applied to both players, so there wasn't much advantage in them, except that some of them gave a fair chance in an unequal game.
The rite of tapping the marbles together as the game started sealed the deal and although there were a lot of rules and they were quite arcane, I don't remember people breaking them at our school. I think everyone wanted to get along and also gamble for those sweet glass spheres.
Marbles had a specific season (during the Autumn term IIRC) and once the season was over playing with them was frowned on until the next year, which did something to keep them fresh.
Dang, we need more anthropology of childhood toys/games. Somehow I just got super fascinated about marbles...just...marbles. XD