If the hurled knife sticks in, the sector gets split up with the line drawn in the direction determined by the stuck knife’s blade sides. The owner of the divided sector has to decide which part of it he wants to keep while the other slice becomes a part of the successful knife-thrower’s domain.

A player stays in the game until they retain a patch of ground big enough to accommodate for their standing upon at least one foot, but with no space even for that, the game is over for them and the remaining players go on until there stays just 1. You win!

And we also played matches, which is a game just for 2. Each player sticks their thumb off their fist, inserts a match, a kinda spacer, between their thumb pad and the middle joint of the index finger, and holds it tight. The matches are slowly pressed against each other, the pressure grows and the player whose match withstands it without breaking up becomes the winner. The same idea as in tapping Easter eggs against each other, only you don’t have to wait a whole year for the game which wasted more than one matchbox nicked from the kitchen at home.

Or we just ran hither-thither playing War-Mommy, yelling, “Hurray!”, or “Ta-ta-ta!”

– Bang! Bang! I’ve shot and killed you!

– Yeah! Okay! I’m just on the doorsill to Death!

And long after the nominally dead warrior would keep a-trotting about that doorsill firing his farewell rounds and only, maybe, hooraying less zealously, if it’s a boy possessing some sense of decency, before to slam, at last, that door behind himself and topple with undeniable theatrical gusto in a grass patch of softer looks.

For taking part in War-Mommy you needed a machine-gun sawed from a plank piece. Yet, some boys played automatic weapons of tin, a black-paint-coated acquisition from a store.

Such machine-guns had to be loaded with special ammunition – rolls of narrow paper strips with tiny sulfur blobs planted in them. When struck by the spring trigger hummer, such a blob gave a loud report and the paper strip got automatically pulled on bringing the next blob in the strip in place of the fired… Mom bought me a tin pistol and a box of pistons—small paper circles with the same sulfur blobs which had to be inserted manually for each separate shot. After the bang, a tiny wisp of sore smelling smoke rose from under the trigger.

One day when I was playing the pistol in the sand pile by the garbage enclosure, a boy from the corner building asked me to present the handgun to him and I readily gave it away. Being a son of an officer, he, of course, needed and had more rights to it than me… But Mom refused to believe that anyone would give his gun away to another boy just so casually. She demanded of me to confess the genuine truth about losing Mom’s present, yet I stuck to my truth so stubbornly, that she even had to lead me to the apartment of that boy in the corner building. The officer started to chastise his son, yet Mom said she was so sorry and asked to excuse her because she only wanted to make sure I did not lie.

~ ~ ~

That summer the boys from our Block began to play with yellowish cartridges of real firearms which they were hunting at the shooting range in the forest. I wanted so badly to see what shooting range might look like, yet bigger boys explained that you could visit it only on special days when there was no shooting because on any other day they’d shoo you off.