Pogs

Pogs (also Milkcaps) is the name of a game that was popular from the early-to-mid-1990s. It got its name from POG, a brand of fruit juice (made from passion fruit, orange and guava); the caps of POG bottles were originally used to play the game. more...

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Pog originated in Hawaii around the 1930s, and was repopularized when the Canada Games Company reintroduced them to the American mainstream public in the mid-1990s, where they became popular with pre-teens. It is possible that the game traced its origins to the Japanese card game called Menko.

History

The game of pogs is said to have originated in the early 1920s in Hawaii. Dairy farmers would play the game using milk caps. Blossom Galbiso, a teacher at Waialua Elementary School on the north shore of Oahu, is credited with reviving the game. She began using the milkcaps in her classroom in 1991 and told her students about an old game she used to play by flipping milkcaps to be the first one to get the cream off the bottom. Her students began flipping the milkcaps and the game of pogs rapidly spread to other elementary and middle schools around the US.

However, the origin of the game may, in fact, be much earlier. Menko, a Japanese card game very similar to pogs, has been in existence since the Edo period, or the 17th century.

Rules

Two players both have their own stack of POGs and slammer. Each player contributes the same number of POGs and stacks them facedown. The players take their turn at hitting the stack with their slammer (also called a 'kini' in the United Kingdom), and the players keep the POGs that turn face up after they slam the stack. After each slam, the POGs are restacked. When no POGs are left in the stack, the player with the most POGs wins.

Popularity

Pogs became so popular in the 1990s that hundreds of types of Pogs were manufactured, covering a wide array of toys, cartoons, movies, games, sports and images of famous people on the front of the pogs. The popularity of the game spawned knockoffs, such as "Slammer Whammers," a similar game released under a different brand name. Today the pog craze has tapered off, but pogs can sometimes still be found on eBay and in game and card stores. During the early 1990s, a national pog tournament was held every February 7 in commemoration of the game's inventor's birthday.

School banning

Because many children would keep the pogs they won in games from other players, many school districts considered Pogs a form of gambling. Pogs also proved to be major distractions in lessons and the source of various playground arguments. Also, the "slammers" would often rebound from the floor, hitting other players or nearby persons. Furthermore, in some schools monetary coins began to be used instead of pogs. These elements eventually led to the banning of pogs from several schools across North America, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Read more at Wikipedia.org