I watched Elliot reinvent my childhood the other day, and he had no idea he was doing it.
I had come home from a long day at work to find the living room floor buried under a myriad of beads and crystals. Little 20-cent-coin-sized ones, the fun-size kind kids hoard — with Elliot and Julian sprawled right in the middle of it, fully engrossed. They didn’t notice me come in at all. It was a wonderful sight to behold: two boys, screen-free, completely lost in a game they had built themselves. The crystals came from Elliot’s precious tub — his little reward stash, one to three of them from Miley every time he does something good, topped up with trinkets his classmates keep gifting him.
The game they’d invented, entirely on their own, was a sort of goalpost shootout — two tiny goals rigged up on the tiles, flick a crystal across the floor and try to score it into the other side’s net. Not quite marbles, not quite finger soccer, some seven-year-old hybrid of the two. But watching Elliot line up a shot, tiny index finger cocked behind a shiny stone, I saw guli written all over it — the same flick-and-aim instinct half of us spent our childhoods perfecting, just dressed up with goalposts.
The very next evening, I found him with the bigger crystals, tossing one up and snatching the rest off the floor before it could drop, cackling away with our helper. Five stones. Batu seremban. The exact game I poured half my own childhood into — except mine came in little cloth pouches from the mama shop, and to this day I couldn’t tell you what was inside them. Sand, rice, something. I have never wondered what was inside, we simply played with whatever we have.
Here’s what got me. These games have almost nothing to them — no box, no batteries, no app, no rulebook thicker than a sentence. And yet a bored seven-year-old, left alone with a tub of stones, reached for exactly this kind of play, the same way we did at void decks and along HDB corridors decades before anyone owned a screen.
And as a PE teacher, I can tell you these aren’t only nostalgia. Five stones is hand-eye coordination and fine motor control wearing a fun disguise; chapteh trains balance and leg-eye timing; zero point is explosive jump practice in all but name; congkak has a kid counting moves ahead without realising they’re doing maths. We teach these in schools for a reason — real skills, physical and mental, for close to nothing.
So this is the stuff I actually grew up on, gathered in one place so you can pass it down too. Grab a handful of pebbles and start with the first one.
Scatter the five stones on the floor. Toss one up and, before it lands, snatch a stone off the ground with the same hand — then catch the falling one. You pick them up one at a time, then two at a time, then three, then all four, each round harder than the last. Drop the falling stone or knock a neighbour and your turn’s over. It looks gentle right up until you try it as an adult and discover your reflexes quietly retired years ago.
It’s a weighted rubber disc with a spray of feathers, and the whole game is keeping it airborne with your feet — usually the flat inside of your ankle — for as many kicks as you can without it touching the ground or your hands. On your own you’re chasing your own record; in a group, most kicks in a row wins. Fair warning: it’s humbling. I’ve seen grown men who play football weekly reduced to flailing after two kicks.
You make the “rope” yourself by looping a small mountain of rubber bands into one long chain. Two players hold the ends while everyone else takes turns jumping or hooking their legs over it. It starts at ankle height and climbs — knees, waist, chest, and eventually up around the head, which is where it turns into part gymnastics, part comedy. Miss the height and you swap in. Half the fun was the making of the rope in the first place — weeks of hoarding and “borrowing” rubber bands from anywhere you could.
There are a dozen versions, but the classic is simple: flick your marble with your thumb to strike an opponent’s, and if you hit it, you keep it. Some draw a circle and try to knock rivals out of it; some dig a small hole to aim for. However you play, all the tension lives in that one thumb-flick — which is exactly the instinct I watched Elliot rediscover with his crystals and goalposts, no marbles required. There was always one kid at the void deck with a bulging tin of guli he’d won off half the neighbourhood.
Wind the string tightly around the wooden top, then throw it down with a sharp tug so it lands spinning. The simplest contest is whose top spins the longest; the bolder version draws a ring and you try to knock rivals’ tops out while keeping yours humming inside it. Getting the wind and the throw to work together is genuinely fiddly, which is precisely why kids stick at it for hours. There’s nothing quite like that first clean throw where it lands and just… hums.
When you need them out of the sun for a bit, these next few happen sitting down.
Hold the bundle upright and let it drop so the sticks land in a tangled heap. Then take turns lifting one stick at a time without disturbing any other — twitch a neighbour and your turn ends and the next player has a go. Fancier sticks are worth more points if you retrieve them cleanly. It’s Jenga’s quieter, older cousin, and it can turn the most fidgety kid remarkably still. A perfect one for the kopitiam while you’re waiting on the food.
These are the little plastic tokens — animals, fruit, cartoon shapes — that you flick across a table. The aim is to land yours so it overlaps or sits on top of your opponent’s, and if you pull it off, their piece is yours. Recess-desk currency, basically; whole collections changed hands over these before the bell rang. The good news for nervous parents: they’ve thankfully sized them up from the tiny choking-hazard originals.
Every kid had a stack of these — little rectangular erasers printed with country flags. You each set one on the desk, then take turns pressing down on the edge of yours to make it hop; land it on top of your opponent’s and you’ve won their eraser. Endless, and playable on any flat surface with something already in the pencil case. The great classroom economy ran on these — usually right up until a teacher swept the lot into a drawer.
A long carved wooden board lined with two rows of little hollows and a “store” at each end. You scoop up all the seeds from one of your hollows and “sow” them one at a time into each hollow around the board, banking any that drop into your own store along the way. Land your last seed just right and you earn another turn or snatch your opponent’s — but the goal is simply to hoard more in your store than they do. It’s the one game here that’s pure thinking, and a sharp kid will start counting moves ahead without ever realising it’s maths.
Here’s the lovely part about this whole list: it barely costs a thing. A few of them you would want to buy — bean bags for five stones, a chapteh, a congkak board, a handful of kuti-kuti — but even those run a couple of dollars each at a neighbourhood shop, or on Shopee and Lazada if the mama shops near you have long since turned into bubble tea outlets. The rest are essentially free. Zero point is a bag of rubber bands. Marbles and erasers are probably already in a drawer. Sticks are, well, sticks.
But the real reason I wanted to write this down is simpler than saving you money. I didn’t teach Elliot to play marbles. Nobody did. He got bored, tipped out a tub of stones, and his hands found the game on their own — the same game mine found forty years ago at a void deck. These things survive because they’re good, not because anyone’s marketing them. They’re well-documented too — the National Library keeps a whole archive of them — but a database entry isn’t the same as a parent on the floor showing you how. All they need is for someone to hand them down before the memory of them fades.
So grab a handful of pebbles, sit on the floor with your kids, and be gloriously terrible at five stones in front of them. They’ll love watching you lose. And somewhere in the middle of it, without either of you noticing, they’ll be building the exact skills we spend a fortune trying to teach them with everything else.
More screen-free play
- When Kids Say “I’m Bored” — What to Do Without Screens — for the next time they announce there’s nothing to do.
- Best Board Games for Family Game Night — when you’re ready to bring the games to the table.
- How to Teach Your Child a New Board Game — the trick to teaching any game without the rulebook lecture.