The History of Flipping

[JollyElm]

(I'm going to try to ignore what a sweet piece of *ss that girl is in the OP. Yowza!!!!!!!!)

As a tyke in 1975, we used to flip the colorful new cards. IIRC, we called it 'topsies' (Toppsies?), where you stood back from the playground wall and tossed a card. The goal was to make it land front side up. Your opponent then flipped a card in the same manner (from a stack of cards held with the fronts facing downward, unseen), and if the top color (behind the team name) of the two-toned card matched the last one thrown, you won the cards. We went until someone won all of the cards thrown up to that point. Sometimes it was a mere pair, and other times it was quite a heap of cardboard.

Well, being clever little kids, we decided to beat the system by cutting up our cards to form a winning amalgam of many colors that was inserted into our stack, like so...

1975colorsamalgam.jpg

Of course, if it was thrown incorrectly and landed face down, we ran the risk of it falling into enemy hands if they won that particular round, shooting ourselves in the foot with a cardboard bullet. Those were some anxious moments. Since there weren't any specific rules against this type of deception (much like the 1919 Black Sox discussion), we had no problem employing the maneuver. However, being kids, the screams of "No fair!!!!!!!!!!!!" would come immediately, quickly followed by fisticuffs...and we'd be sent home in our dirt-stained clothes to face the wrath of our mothers

Good times.

[molenick]

Here is another one, which was pretty common among my friends. It's kind of a variation on the odd/even game already described.

One person takes a number of cards (say, 10), and one-by-one, holding the card between the thumb and three other fingers (not the pinkie), flips each card to the ground in an underhand motion, letting go of the card roughly when your arm was pointing straight down. The idea was to get as many cards as you could facing in the same direction (heads or tails). After your 10 were flipped, the other person had to match what you did (so, for example, getting nine heads and one tail was good because it was hard to match). If the person matched you, they got your cards; if not, you got the cards flipped plus enough to cover the remainder of cards not thrown (in case the "non-matching" was already determined before all the cards were flipped).

Colors was the preferred game in a situation where you had to sit down and didn't want to attract attention (like in school) and this game was preferred when you could stand up and it wasn't an issue if anyone saw you playing.