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Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

It is a very, very British thing. A generation or two ago, almost everyone played it at school and it was Very Serious Business. I guess you needed something to occupy yourself before Pokemon Go was invented.

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I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.

Being of a geeky bent, I tried them all. It never worked. They go brittle and shatter, or they go soft and fall apart.

(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).

Cheaters never prosper!

In many places the cup-and-ball [1] game was/is popular. It's incredible to think now about games that doesn't require batteries and USB ports.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball

"A generation or two ago" roughly corresponds to the Tamagotchi era too.

Or two? Why do you have to be like that?

Like what ??

Reminding all of us how old we are

It’s not even true, no one had Tamagotchis two generations ago unless your generations are 15 years or so… Or am I counting generations completely wrong? Are kids these days two generations removed from millennials?

Well, sorry to be a bummer again, but indeed kids these days are from the Alpha generation, which is two generations from Millenials (GenZ being in-between) :

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ge...

It was very common in Ireland too, hunting for conkers was always fun. However I don't think it is common at all now

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