"Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless." --Calvin, from Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes
Yesterday a couple friends and I spent an hour or so playing a made-up a version of disc golf using a frisbee and a soccer ball simultaneously at a park near where I live. We basically took turns creating our own holes, which usually involved picking a tree to go around first before taking aim at another tree as a final target.
It took me most of the time that we were there before I was hit with flashbacks from similar games when I was a kid. I remember one game my best friend growing up and I made up, involving only a tennis ball and a tennis ball bottle. One person would be the "pitcher" and the other the "catcher." In this game the catcher would sport a baseball glove and stand near the bottle--the pitcher's target in which to knock over--and try and catch or at least deflect the ball before it hit said bottle. The quirk though, was the catcher could only use the glove to catch or deflect the ball, and had to rest the glove on his leg and then try to catch it at the very last minute before the ball would hit the bottle. It was a great test of reflexes, that's for sure.
It was quite an interesting game in how we scored it, too. Most games people score only when on offense. Our game had both "offensive points" and "defensive points." Clearly the offensive points would be based on how many times the pitcher would knock over the bottle before the catcher would have a chance to catch the ball. The defensive points would consequently be how many catches the catcher makes (deflections don't count). So there was some incentive to try and catch the ball at the very last minute.
The game was organized very similar to innings in baseball: the pitcher had a certain number of throws to knock the bottle over. I don't remember if we had anything equivalent of strikes or balls or not, but a "catch" correlated quite nicely to an "out" in baseball.
Another game I remember was much simpler and kinda lame, but we loved it anyway: the game's idea was similar to "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey," except the blindfolded person was spun around and then had to guess and throw at a predetermined object before the blindfold had been put on.
I guess that's it as far as games that I've completely made up while hanging out with a friend or two over time. I've spent a fair share of time (esp. during the warm months) just going out and throwing a ball or frisbee, or playing some version of a real sport just for the fun of it. It's kind of funny, some of the things I've spent my "free time" doing came from Calvin and Hobbes, and the kinds of things they did while outside. I guess it's no surprise that I sometimes subscribe to the Calvin quote at the beginning of this post. It's amazing that it only came to me in the last couple days.