h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Any number of players is good for this,but the more the better.
One person is picked as being ON (or IT),using whatever method.
This person would then proceed to chase the others.
BUT, when the person who is ON catches somebody,instead of passing the buck to the caught person,they are instead BOTH ON.
Each person who is caught catches someone else.
Soon, there is loads of people ON,and few not.This is when it starts to get really fun.Now we have pack hunting going on.
Eventually,everyone is ON bar one last person.They've won,so they start off as being ON in the next round.
We called it "Build up".
Now THAT was fun....

Or the eternal classic "Stuck in the mud"
Again,the more the better.
One person starts off as being ON.
When they catch someone,the person who was caught has to stop moving.
Now,this person has to stay like that until another person who is still free crawls under their legs.
when everone is stuck,whoever was ON now isn't,and the last person to be caught is.
ALSO fun..

The one you called Build-Up sounds very similar to one we used to play called 'British Bulldog'. Again it started off with picking one person to be IT by the usual methods. All the rest would then have to run from one side of the playground to the other without being caught and lifted off the ground by IT. Anybody caught joined the IT team and everybody else chased back across the playground in the other direction trying not to get caught. This continued until only one child was still free - the winner was hailed as the British Bulldog.
This game was great fun but tended to become very aggressive when the IT team was a majority mob. Eventually the level of violence got the game banned from my school grounds.

I have played both British Bulldog (violent at the end when the hardest kid is trying to push his way past a group!) and also 'Build-Up' although I can't remember what we called it.

We called standard Tag "Touch". This is where one person is "on it" at a time. Being "on it" seemed to be the common term in South Wales as opposed to being "it" which seems to have been in general use in England.
One Variant was "Offground Touch" where you were immune if you were not touching the floor. This could only work in places (like my primary school playground) that had an appropriate number of ledges/drainpipes/etc. to climb on - but not too many!
Another common variant was "Ball Touch", which seemed a perfectly good name to us but is hilarious to some people who've never heard of it. This is where a ball (usually a tennis ball) was the method used to put someone on it. The greater range and speed of a thrown ball meant a faster game and required a larger playing area.

Another rule that was invented (and shortlived) in our school was that you could be immune if you had crosses. This involved putting your thumb between first and second fingers if you were a boy, and crossing your fingers in a National Lottery styley if you were a girl. This didn't last long in tag as it made it too easy and the person who was 'it' usually protested. However the method of crossing fingers was thought to be a cure for lots of things, including getting the 'lurgies', whatever that was (all we knew is that it was bad).

Interesting version of 'build up' is Vampire. It's essentially the same game except the people who are 'it' are called Vampires. There is a place designated as a 'Church' which the vampires can't enter.

Never encourage teenagers to play as it may lead to hickies

This isn't really a tag game, but it's still in the same vague catagory. HTe game is called Poison. It involves a bunch of people and maybe half a dozen balls (usually of the large beach ball/kickball variety). If you throw and hit someone with a ball, they are poisoned and have tosit down where they are. However, if they catch the ball the thrower is poisoned. There is usually a house rule that says if you hit someone on the head you are automatically poisoned. The only way to get unpoisoned is to grab a ball that rolls by and poison someone else with it. After you hit them you can stand up and move around. The winner is the last one unpoisoned (able to move around). It is a very fast game, but very fun.

There are a couple of variations on 'Stuck in the Mud'. One or more (usually more) people were 'it'. Anyone they managed to touch had to, variously, stick their arms out and keep them there, or stand with their feet wide apart (the 'variously' depends on who said what the rules were). Anyone who hadn't yet been tagged could un-tag someone by ducking under their arms or crawling between their legs, whichever was appropriate. I'm not sure if the people who weren't 'It' could ever win, or if it was just a case of 'until everyone's stuck in the mud or break ends'. I suppose if there was a time limit, the horde (for want of a better word) won if some were still unstuck when time ran out, or the 'It squad' [my coinage, not a classic one] otherwise.

Oh yes, Bulldog, British Bulldog, Build-up whatever - great game - I used to win accasionally as I was usually the biggest and fastest when I was 7 or 8 (shame most grew up and overtook me )

Don't really know if this is a variant or a completely different game but a perennial fave of our small welsh town was Mob-1-2-3.

Basically Hide and seek with a twist, the poor soul who was on it would roam looking for the hiders. As soon as he spotted someone he had to race to the designated "Mob Post", usually a drainpipe or fence post, touch it and sing out "Mob 1-2-3 Darren (or whoever) behind the blue astra!" Darren is then out and usually takes out his fury by slying pointing out other hiders on his walk to the Mob Post.

The twistier twist is that, should Darren take his finger out of his nose long enough to see he's been spotted, he can decide to race the soul 'on it' to the Mob Post. Should Darren get there and sing out "Mob-1-2-3 SAFE!" before 'on it' can Mob him, then he is safe and won't be 'on it' next go. Last Mobbed person is 'on it' next go. You can also "Steal Mob" by watching 'on it' for a lapse of concentration and then just legging it like a good 'un for the Mob Post.

In our town, if you were quick enough to shout "perald" then this was the same as having fingers crossed and you couldn't be got. This usually led to fights, or scraps. My girlfriend, from Cumbria, tells me they had the same thing called "skinches". Odd.

We called it 45 and In. There's already another thread on this one

Thanks, I missed Kick the Can, I'll put this post where it's meant to be.

Whoops, sorry I repeated what you said, Mac.

We used to play 'It' (as tag was called in our school) with a rule of 'no hit-backs'. That meant that if you were tagged you weren't allowed to immediately tag back the person who'd got you and was now trying to run away. We'd had a few incidents where people stood there slapping each other merrily for minutes on end. Which was boring - we all wanted to be running around.

--
Talith

We used to play much the same game, but I always remember that there was a 'sanctuary' area where one headed for in moments of extreme persecution. When you got there, in case anyone forgot what it was, you used a puzzling gesture called 'three grounds', which involved saying it and holding up three fingers. I still have no idea where this came from or what it really meant. Anybody do the same?

I remember so many twists on the game of tag... there was one called Snake In The Grass where whoever was the dreaded IT would, instead of running around, have to crawl everywhere on his belly. All the other players would start by touching the snake with one hand, and would proceed to run away very quickly when the snake shouted "Snake-in-the-grass!" Every time someone got tagged by the snake, they too would become a snake until there was an entire field of writhing, hissing snakes. Definitely requires smaller boundaries than a regular game of tag since human snakes can't go very far very fast.

Fans of B-grade horror movies may want to play The Blob, where It is now The Blob (what a concept, eh?) When someone is tagged, they hold hands with the blob, so there are now two people galloping around the field. Once the Blob is sufficiently big (usually three or four people), it can take out people by surrounding them, then absorbing them into the ever-growing chain of bodies.

Then, there are the people who frequent Renaissance Festivals. An excellent game for them to try is Catch The Dragon's Tail. Everyone forms a line and puts their hands on the hips of the person in front of them. The person at the head of the line is the head of the dragon, trying to catch the tail. The person at the front knows where he's going, the person in the back has a good idea of where they're going, but the people in the middle... well... once the head catches the tail, the head becomes the tail and someone else gets a chance to lead the chase. Any more than about 8 people in a dragon gets interesting very very quickly. For more than that, an interesting twist is to split into two or more dragons trying to catch each other's tails.

Blob was called "Chain-he" in our primary school and was periodically banned as dangerous because the next to last person caught was often flung to the ground by the chain hurtling after the last (and fastest)person. Tag was called "He" . Interestingly, I can't remember girls playing.

With regards to 'the Lurgies', I think they are similar to what schoolkids in the U.S. call 'cooties' - which as I recall was something that only boys had, or the unliked girl, and was passed via touch. The point was to not 'have cooties' which I often envisioned as some sort of imaginary flea. Strangely enough the idea of cooties tended to disappear once kids reached puberty age.

The version of Stuck in the Mud that I remember playing as a kid was 'Freeze Tag'. It was your basic tag game where one person was 'It' and when they tagged another person that person then had to freeze in whatever position they were in (which tended to be running positions or mid-stride) and they would have to hold that position (as well as possible - or if the It person was kind, they would be allowed to get both feet on the ground) until they were either tagged by somebody that was not It, or the game ended when the It person tagged the rest of the crowd out. Normally this was not a popular game because eventually a person that wasn't as fast and/or nimble as the others would spend an hour being It before the complaints mounted and it was time to switch games.

Variations on the theme of Freeze Tag included being immune. ie, Cartoon tag meant that if you named a cartoon character then you wouldn't be tagged. The catch, however, was that you couldn't repeat a cartoon character that had already been named.