Rate this childhood nostalgia

Pogs

They were just discs of cardboard but by crikey they were bloody awesome. Purported to be replicas of milk bottle caps from Hawaii the aim of the game was infuriatingly simple. Stack ‘em and whack ‘em, kids! Using the kini Pog (pictured) you had to slam your large plastic piece on a stack of the cardboard tokens to try and flip as many as possible. The ones you did flip were keepsies, everything else went back into the pile. Even though Pogs were won and lost and the fact that they were essentially casino chips from a very simple game I still don’t recall any element of actual gambling when I was a nipper. It just seemed case of everyone putting in their Pogs until someone cried and tried to start a fight because you kept stealing their hard-earned bits of cardboard.

The Pogs themselves were great. I still remember when series one came out and I was just the right age to sink my teeth into this latest fad, devouring everything Pog-related until Tazos came out and all of a sudden Pogs just weren’t cool any more. Remember the booster packs? I think each one came with a checklist card and it wasn’t long before I had a full set of series one in an official orange plastic Pog container, plus about a hundred of the floating eye Pog which I remember seemed to float around more than anything else. When series two came out it went a bit weird, the colours were brighter and there was almost certainly a distinct Hawaii flavour to this new set, so maybe the legend of the milk bottle caps was actually true and they were just out to prove a point. Along with my completed series one and two, attained after months of trading with mates, “Got, got, got, got, got, got, got, need! Need! NEED!! Got, got got, got, got…” I also had all the kini counters. The several dozen holographic variations of the skull motif took up almost another plastic can and it wasn’t long until I was collecting all the Pogs, not just the official ones (I even had a few Space Precinct Pogs).

Everyone was on the bandwagon and this wagon was warm and comfortable, it had fully reclining chairs and TV sets set in the seat in front of you. It was an awesome time to be a kid and perhaps an awesome time to be a businessman. These kids were spending all their money, and quite often their parents’ money, on bits of printed cardboard. Cardboard. These companies were literally printing money and we lapped it up.

No other fad has come close to the divine simplicity of Pogs, forget Pokemon and those cheap colourful rubber shoes with the holes in, bits of printed cardboard were the way.

Usefulness in settling arguments between warring factions in the playground: 7 out of 7

Cynical and jaded view of how good an idea it was on purely business terms: 7 out of 7

Rated: 6 out of 7