Obligatory Pogs Post

What can be said about Pogs that hasn't been said a hundred times? They were little Poker-chip-like disks with colorful pictures on them, there were like a million of them, and you played some kind of game with them. The 8yo me had no idea what those things were, just that they were down every cool kid's pocket, and that there were a million of them. Some were like the Holy Grail trying to find, but a whole lot weren't worth more than a regular soda coaster. Evidently, it seems that the game originated in Hawaii during the 1920s with kids using milk caps. Over time, some teacher somewhere started teaching kids how to play the game using caps from this stuff called POG juice (Passion Fruit, Orange, and Guava), thus the name "Pog" became forever associated with it. In the 90s, for some reason, the game took off in popularity so much that it became a cultural phenomenon forever linked to the 90s. But I think Children of the 90s said it best:

Still, though, we're just hurling a slightly bigger disc at a pile of smaller discs, so something tells me we as 90s children possessed the inherent trait of being incredibly easily amused. You just couldn't sell that to today's kid. They'd be bored out of their minds before you even got to the word "slammer." 

Slammer? "Hehe... slammer... hehe" --Beavis 

Kids used to trade them on the bus, at the lunch table, at recess, and that's basically how I got acquainted with them. I didn't know what you did with them other than collect them and pass them around, but I was not immune to having a couple kicking around at the bottom of my backpack just in case I ever had to learn. There was no choice, you had to keep a few on you just to say you were cool. I still never really got what they were, just that all the cool kids were into them. And the reason they were cool? Because they had cool pictures on them.

And I mean if you could think it, there was a Pog for it. They came in these endless series, with cartoons, tire rims, sports teams, sports balls, movies, bugs, Goosebumps, states, flags, aliens, planets, cars, Sonic the Hedgehog, Star Trek, crazy 8s, psychedelic stuff, trippy flowers, monsters, eyeballs, skulls, superheroes... anything and everything that could be rendered in glorious 90s neon. If you were into something, there was a Pog for it that would immediately make you cool for having it, and if you actually "won" the entire series of something, then you could consider yourself elite.

The game itself had something to do with stacking your pogs four high and face down and then hurling other pogs into them to scatter them. Those that landed face up were claimed by the kid hurling the pog. Those that landed face down went back into the stack for another round. I'm sure though that there were as many variations on the game as there were elementary schools, but that was pretty much the gist. What made it potentially fun and potentially resulted in you getting an atomic wedgie from your opponent (and therefore interesting), was that (being a game mostly of luck), you always had the potential to start raking in your opponent's pogs just for landing them face up. However, there were two basic ways to play... for fun, and the infamous "for keeps," both of which had to be spelled out beforehand, but depending on the size and ferocity of your opponent, didn't always matter. That's basically how you collected new pogs, but if you had nothing to start, none of the big time players wanted to waste their time with you (unless they wanted to offload a lot of their worthless ones). Playing "for fun" meant the loser got back their pogs after the game. Playing "for keeps" meant that either someone was coming home with some new pogs, or coming home with a black eye, or both. 

Seriously, this was that important. In most cases though, experienced players knew not to let their rarer pogs enter the game play on the off chance they'd land face up. As many in the paranoid media and PTA groups at the time pointed out, it was a form of gambling. They were right, but still, there was no reason they had to try to get the things banned from schools just because they taught us the importance of the gamblers fallacy. That's educational after all, and trust me, these things made or broke you on the hallowed recess play yards of yore. If you had a badass design, or a neon-green or something, you were D-O-P-E, and everyone wanted to "slam" with you. If you had nothing but Care Bears and puppies, then don't even bother going to school. 

Besides the Pog, there was the "Slammer," and those conferred instant cool cred whenever they were whipped out, because they were like weapons. The Slammer was this heavy piece, like a medallion, which could get pretty badass if it was the "circular saw" kind, but it could also just be a plastic checker piece-like thing. If you whipped out your slammer, your opponents knew they were done for, unless they had a heavier one. It was literally an arms race of "mine's bigger" mutually-ensured destruction.

I had to picture that there was some kid somewhere who was sitting on a throne of these things, in a castle built out of stacks of these things, just kicking back, basking in the glory... some kid who was like, the Pog Master, who had somehow managed to land everyone's face down. That kid would've been the king of awesomeness. I wonder where that kid is these days.