When I was around 5 or 6 I played a game of POGs with my cousins and god siblings on Christmas day. See, we had all just gotten some new tubes (yeah they came in tubes) of the things and wanted to have some fun by playing for keeps one tube each. (That means we ponied up one tube each and played for keeps on the whole thing.)

POGs is a simple game. You pile up all your POG caps face down. An actual pile always worked the best but we took the time to build an actual pyramid given how many of them we had. You used a hard plastic or wood disk a little bigger than a common bearing (some kids would actually use bearings, I used a disk of milled steel by dad got from a work friend), called a slammer that works by being thrown (or slammed) into the pile to bounce the POG pieces into the air. Any pieces that land face up are kept. Any pieces still face down are re-stacked or piled. (though we always played where they land). You go back and forth like this until all the pieces land face up and every one has taken their winnings.

Given that there were about a dozen of us the game took awhile, one of my cousins smashed a toe with his slammer. Another put a hole in a wall (We got a Christmas ass whooping out of that one.) We also got into a pretty big argument when two of my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cousins tried to cheat by shaking the board we were playing on (My oldest god brother had made a custom POG arena board, no ♥♥♥♥). The point of POGs was to try and flip and collect as many of the little tokens as possible, who ever had the most by the end of the game was the winner obviously.

That day Father Christmas must have been smiling on little 5 or 6 year old me because I not only got to play a game of POGs with the big kids, and I assure you they did not take it easy on me, but I walked away with the lions share of shiny new POGs.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I already am a little POG champ.