To Put Away Childish Things #9: A Special Appeal

I sat here for half an hour racking my brains.

Then I turned to my friend Mr Google and racked his brains.

To no avail.

So now I'm going to write the blog entry without pictures and without very much real information and toss it out into the wild to see if anyone else can answer the question.

When I was young I had two different table top football games but neither of them was Subbuteo. By football, of course, I mean the game that goes by that name in England, which some of you will know as soccer.

Let me describe them both. 

The first game consisted of a cardboard football pitch which was folded out onto the table top. The players were about two centimetres tall and sat on a flat circular base. There was a plastic goal fitted at each end. Instead of a ball there was a counter and the game was played like a cross between subbuteo and tiddlywinks with the counter being flicked from player to player and eventually into, hopefully, the back of the net.

The second game was rather more sophisticated and was played with a metal ball. It was also rather odd. The playing field was a green plastic contraption about a yard long. The players were a similar size to the ones in the first game but slotted into holes on the plastic base on top of a paddle. The paddles were rotated using knobs at the ends of the board. Each of the player positions sat in the bottom of a depression so that the surface of the field was like the cratered surface of the moon but ensuring that the ball , after following a very eccentric path, always settled at the feet of a player. Again play proceeded by batting the ball from player to player and hopefully into the net. I suppose this one could be characterised as a cross between Subbuteo and pinball.

I've never been a football fan but these games actually had precious little to do with football and were both, in their own ways, rather fun and certainly easier to play than subbuteo ever was.

Does anyone (well any of my three or so British readers) recall either of these games and what they were called. It would be nice to be able to find some pictures of them somewhere.