When was the last time you spent some time with yourself? Revisiting old lanes, friends or even playing old games. Our childhood has the most exciting and sweetest memories. Irrelevant of the generation you are born in, the period till you do not start working for money is the best time.

Couple of months ago I visited my mom and brother. Children’s summer vacation had just begun, so we had no stress of getting up early or finishing homework. It’s rare to see a relaxed mom, so even the kids were happy. My brother and I were talking about our summer vacation days, which was almost 2 decades ago.

All our close relatives from maternal and paternal side lived in the same city. So summer vacation gatherings were no less than a village fair. 10-12 kids at one place. Now when I am in my mom’s shoes I realize how difficult it must have been for her to keep all of us engaged and happy. Our parents made sure that we all kids come under one roof at least for a couple of nights. The bond that was created among all the cousins and sibling is still strong. Now he has moved to a new city, plus everyone is busy with their own lives. So such get-to-gathers have become rare to almost none.

At that time mobile and gadgets were not there so all we had was each other and cards and board games. Parents were also not this busy; most of the jobs were not 24*7 or in US or Australian shifts. So they actually sat with us, to teach us games of their childhood or just being a banker in our business or Monopoly game. We learned many new and old games and played games in small as well as large groups. Fighting, crying, snatching, bulling, and teaming OH My God! It was all so much fun.

There is a game in Maharashtra called “athoo- challas”, the basic structure and rules of the game are like Ludo. Max 4 people can play it; you have to kill other players stub to be eligible to start reaching the end. But the major difference is the layout of the game is little different and instead of a dice sea shells are used. These are called cowrie and you can get any number 1 to 8, unlike 6 in dice. And the pegs could be broken buttons, coloured pebbles or even broken glass bangle pieces. The game was competitive, though team work and gave sense of achievement too.

Apart from these there were many card games 4-3-2, gulamchor, rummy and many more. Cards offered a vast variety of games, to be played in groups, couple or even solo. My favourite solo card game is solitaire. Solitaire requires tremendous patience. It was my dad’s favourite game. He used to sit on our old desktop computer to play solitaire for hours.

While we were getting nostalgic and talking out our childhood games, mat tech-savvy and gamer child showed me an amazing website called https://www.solitaire.org/

This website had many games related to cards and not only that, but the games like Minesweeper, mahjong tiles, hidden objects that we used to play on desktop computers when windows was new.

The site is clean, with no malware and unnecessary advertisements hence safe for kids too.

We literally binged on this site, every now and then when we got time, till we played almost every game. My son had got the board game of ‘Battleship’, but it takes a lot of time to play it but on https://www.solitaire.org/ I even found that game too. Attaching a few pictures of the games we played, it was really good time. We made new memories based on old memories.

It was time for vacation to come to an end. This time it was lot of quality time spent. It is always fun to get nostalgic; we revisit the beautiful memory lanes again. It gives a break from daily rut, stress and rejuvenates mind and heart. Which all of your childhood games have you transferred to the next generation?