Ciao Angel
I am playing Deep Blue the computer that beat Kasparov at chess and losing badly. It’s a bit dispiriting so I wondered if you would like to meet up for a game of marbles. I can bring some as according to your book you’ve lost your own.
Learning how to play has been quite a challenge and as you probably know there are many different games of marbles. The most common seems to be Ringers and these are the rules:
Two mibsters arrange 13 ducks in an X at the center of a 10′ diameter ring. The mibsters take turns knuckling down with their shooters and firing into the ducks, scattering them. Any ducks that leave the ring are worth one point each. If his shooter stays in the ring, the mibster can keep shooting ducks, earning more points. However, once his shooter leaves the ring, it’s the next mibster’s turn. Once all 13 marbles have been knocked out, the ducks are re-racked into an X again for the next round. Play continues until one mibster has 50 points.
Have you got that? Mibsters by the way are marble players, ducks are small marbles sometimes also called mibs but peewees are much smaller, while bigger marbles could be shooters, taws, bonkers, plumpers, mashers, bumbos, bumboozers, tonks, dobbers, biggles or toebreakers.. Aggies are made of agate whereas an alley is often made of alabaster, bumblebees are yellow and black striped and onionskins have layered swirls of colour. Knuckling down means getting your hand in a position to shoot. There are a lot of other types of marble including toothpaste, turtle, clambroth, and the famous lutz marbles made in Germany, but I can explain all that when we play.
It seems that marbles have a much longer history than I thought and ancient examples have been found in many places from the Indus valley to Mesopotamia, the ruins of Pompeii to tombs in Egypt. The invention of scissors for making marbles out of glass in 1846 made Germany the main centre of marble manufacture until mass production by machine started in America and there was a craze for them at the end of that century.
Marbles involves a whole language of it’s own so there’s a few more things you need to know – quitsies allow an opponent to stop the game without consequence, keepsies that a player keep all the marbles they win, elephant stomps allow you to stomp your marble into the ground so its harder to hit and leaning tops are where a player leans in for leverage. My favourite is bombies when you drop a marble on one of your opponent’s marbles.
See you soon. The loser buys the pizza.
Marcelo Panettone