8 Time-Tested Sidewalk Games We Love

It was a victory for the little people—and in this case, the winners really were little. The New York Times headline read “Hopscotch Wins Place in Housing,” and the story, published in 1958, reported how local officials had agreed to remove so-called “improvements” put in place at public housing projects—shrubs, cobblestones, grassy margins—and lay down plain asphalt. “City youngsters who insist that pavements are best for playing games,” journalist Charles Grutzner writes, “have scored a point with the City Housing Authority.”

Growing up in New York in the 1970s, my family moved around a lot—we lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and finally Queens—and wherever we went, there were sidewalk games, most of which required just a few sticks of chalk and a suitably bouncy rubber ball. These days, with isolation rules in place and summer camps closed, such pastimes remain a simple and special way to entertain your kids, whether you live in a brownstone, a suburban home with a big driveway, or a rural area with a nearby schoolyard.

Equipment is simple: Though sidewalk chalk has become a hot item in the era of pandemics and quarantines, with different varieties going in and out of stock, you can still find some with a little looking (here’s our current pick, and here’s an alternative). Another essential is a pink rubber ball, known to old-time New Yorkers as a “spaldeen” (argot for the Spalding brand name). You can still buy from that manufacturer, though informal testing on our local stoop determined that the Pinky Ball was a little bouncier and denser. If you need beanbags, you can appropriate them from a cornhole set; or, on a hot day, substitute water balloons (YES!). Finally, the tennis-ball-sized spaldeen may be a little too small for pint-sized players. An 8.5-inch kickball might be a better option.

Now that you have your equipment, below are the games, as well as links to expanded how-tos. To come up with this list, I polled folks I grew up with and then searched for modern variations. When I posted in my neighborhood Facebook group for ideas on which games to include, I got hundreds of nostalgia-laden replies. My favorites were from people who’d introduced these activities to a new generation of kids.

“We played so many of these games,” said Nancy Hesko, who grew up in Douglaston, Queens, and attended the same elementary school that I did (P.S. 98). “And my grandkids have come to love them. They’ve stood the test of time.”

Hopscotch

The mother of all sidewalk games. There are dozens of variations, all of which derive from a surprising historical source: Hopscotch is said to have originated from training exercises for Roman legionnaires. Arrays of boxes, some hundreds of feet long, were sketched out to serve as agility exercises for soldiers on the march (modern analog: tire obstacles for football players). The basic game involves tossing a flat stone or coin onto a numbered grid, which can be drawn either as a sort of ladder or with an alternating pattern of one box, then two, then one again. Players have to hop on one leg from one end of the grid to the other (and back again) without stepping in the panel the object landed on. Sometimes the end of the grid is marked with a symbol—often a half-moon—or a word, like “home” or “London” (the latter of which recalls the game’s historic provenance, as London was a target for Roman expansion).

Skelzie (aka Skully, Skells, or Skelly)

A more complex chalk-and-grid game, Skelzie consists of flipping bottle caps in sequence along a grid numbered to 13; there are danger zones that set the flipper back to zero. Instructions are here, but we’ll offer this hint: Beverage-sized bottle caps need to be weighed down, either with melted crayon or dried glue. A better option is to use larger metal bottle caps, like the kind on pickle jars (so start eating some regionally appropriate pickles now).

Four square

This game is played on a four-box grid. The boxes are about 2 square feet, numbered one through four. Four or more kids can play. The object is to bounce a ball from box to box, with each player taking turns trying not to hit a chalked line or go outside the box. When a player does that, they’re eliminated. If there are more than four kids playing, another takes the eliminated competitor’s place. Winner is the last kid standing. Here’s a good online tutorial (just ignore the grown-ups hogging all the fun).

Chalk darts

Draw a bull’s-eye (concentric circles of different colors). Mark the circles with point values, with the highest values at the inner circles; then, use coins, beanbags, sponges, or water balloons to hit the targets. As kids, we played this with pennies and nickels, and if you hit the target, the money was yours. (And yes, teaching children how to gamble is an acceptable way to pass the isolated hours.)

Hit the Penny

This requires two boxes. Draw a roughly 8-by-4-foot rectangle, then divide it into two 4-by-4-foot squares. Rest a coin (or a bottle cap, or even a stick—the bigger the object, the easier the game) on the dividing line. Players stand at either end of the grid and toss a ball, beanbag, or water balloon at the object in the middle. The goal is to hit the object. Bonus points if the object actually flips.

Boxball

Probably the easiest of all sidewalk games, and the one I played the most growing up. You can make a grid just like the one in Hit the Penny, or use sidewalk squares as a natural court. The basic rules are similar to ping-pong. You serve a spaldeen by slapping it over the “net” (the center line). To be in bounds, the ball needs to bounce directly within the opposite square. You get a point for making your opponent miss; your opponent scores if you miss the target or the ball. Winner is the first player with 21 points. A downloadable rules sheet for boxball, as well as for dozens of other sidewalk games, can be found at Streetplay.com. (A variant of this game, played on stairs, is called “stoopball.”)

ABCs

This one is great for little kids. Use sidewalk squares or draw a grid, then mark each square with a letter. Kids jump from one letter to the next, naming something that begins with that letter (or spelling it with chalk) as they make their way through the alphabet. For littler kids, use colors instead of letters. You can also add a scavenger-hunt element by making the named objects be things that the players can see, or even retrieve.

“Chalkstacle” course

Draw all kinds of shapes—think maze creation—across a broad stretch of sidewalk or schoolyard. Kids have to work their way through the maze; you can add rules such as “hop” or “left foot” to make it harder. Bonus points: This is a great exercise for kids with scooters, or those who are learning to bike.