Marbles

Schoolyard delinquency from approximately 1st Std. to 9th Std. (your personal experience may vary) was not expressed via billiards, cigarettes, tardiness, graffiti, or alcohol. It was best expressed via playing the game of Marbles.

Marbles can be played on any terrain, the packed red earth of a mudtank, a rough hewn granite sidewalk off a busy road, a patchy grassy street corner in your neighbourhood... it is surface agnostic and untouched by inclement weather. It is the truest golf of the proletariat.

The spoils are nothing short of glorious, so participants play with passion. The rules are sometimes community specific in their details and often ad-hoc by a process of mutual consensus, which renders them hotly contested.

The broad stroke is as follows and I shall leave it to other Samosapedians to fill in the details:

You own a set of prized marbles that you bring to the game (milkys, brandys, pintis and doomis, etc.) and these are your anti, your offering. You could go home empty handed! A game of accuracy, skill, and target practice ensues, whereby through a process of knocking about others' marbles you either win theirs or lose your marbles. Like some intensive meld of bowls-cum-poker young lives are created and destroyed in that small circle of death.