4 ms·

Mumbletypeg was still played in Illinois when I was a kid, although the rules changed to trying to get your knife into the ground as close to your foot as possi

• aquova 3y ago
  I played it as a kid in Nebraska as well, except you had to throw it at your opponent's foot, rather than your own. For that reason, we would play it with screwdrivers rather than knives.
• ggm 3y ago
  Yes. that's the same variation we played. That's why the teachers banned it, and we moved to playing it in the green spaces away from supervision after school. It says a lot about the Scots diet it's named after smoked fish there.
  • KMag 3y ago
    You threw the knife as close to the outer edge of your foot as possible, and then moved your stance wider, so that the knife was then on the inside of the foot. In this way, your stance got wider and wider, until on player couldn't move their feet wide enough to continue. Also, your opponent had to reach the knife and pull it from the ground in order to start their turn. Falling over also constituted losing the game. Are we talking about the same game? We called it whitley-peg, and we played it with shovels in the boy scouts in the mid-to-late 1990s to avoid being caught doing such nonsense with a knife (and getting our totin' chip torn up by a responsible adult).
    • ggm 3y ago
      Yes. we're talking about the same game. There's probably a hundred variations but to me, substantively these are the same game. There is a cartoon by Johnny Hart of one of the "B.C." characters playing a variant where the knife balances on the back of the hand, and is flipped and he winds up "stabbing" his shadow which peter-pan like, complains.
    • ticviking 3y ago
      Losin you totin' chip was the worst.