Marbles or buah guli

EVERY YEAR, usually on Good Friday, a crowd gathers at the carpark of the Greyhound Inn, Tinsley Green in West Sussex for the World Marbles Championship. The game had been played in the county for centuries; the tourney in its present form started in 1932. Bearing striking resemblance with what some of us did as kids, the competition is like this:

• The game: Forty nine marbles are placed in a ring. Players get a point for each marble their tolley — a shooting marble — knocks out of the ring. The first team to reach 25 points wins.
• Nose drop: At the start of the game, players perform a “nose drop” i.e. drop their tolleys from their noses to a line drawn in the sand. The player whose tolley lands nearest the line goes first.
• Knuckling down: When they position their hands for shooting, knuckles must rest on the concrete ring.
• Fudging: It is a foul to move your hand forward when shooting. This is called “fudging”.
• Cabbaging: This is another foul – shooting from an incorrect spot.

In 2019, German side “1st MC Erzgebirge” won the World Marbles Championship beating former champions Black Dog Boozers by 39 – 0 in the one sided final. Watch the Youtube video here. Read also here and here.

Marbles: Tiny spheres of fun and innovation

Variations of the game existed in India (read here), Singapore (read here) and Malaysia (read here), no doubt via the colonial influences.

During our school days, the English game did not resonate with us. We played another instead. It went like this:

• Players would wager equal numbers of marbles each. For example, if there were five players and the wager was five, there would be a total of 25 in the pool.
• These 25 marbles would be arranged in a straight line. One end was the head and the other, the tail.
• Play started when each player threw his lunggu (“tolley” in the English game) using the lined marbles as the starting point. The one who threw the furthest got to take first aim at the row of marbles.
• The object of the game was to hit as near the head as possible. If the first person hit the head, he claimed the entire row. Assuming the head was on the left, if he hit the middle, he took all to the left of the one he hit.
• One of the tactics of the game was to place the lunggu near the line so that if most people missed you still had a sizeable remainder to win. To give themselves a 100% chance, the lunggu would be placed next to the head.

Some gems of the game

• The lunggu (or “tolley”) was a prized possession. It was rated for its accuracy. Some people would pay a fair bit (I cannot remember how much) to get hold of a good one.
• The spin: Sometimes, in order to get the lunggu to hit the line, you could not throw in a straight line. Some people spun the lunggu. Others used the incline of the ground to curve the roll, much like putting a golf ball.
• Team play: It was not unusual for us to play in a team of two or three. The team would invest together and place all their marbles in a common “bank” to draw from at every game. The tactics were straightforward: At every play, they would have players with their lunggu at different positions to arrive at the best outcome – usually one very far, the second in the middle and the last near the head of the line.
• Phak chniaw! This means “rob” or “snatch” in Hokkien. In school, just before the bell rang to signal the end of recess, a few boys, usually the more naughty seniors, would gather near the line of marbles. When the bell rang, they would scream phak chniaw! and grabbed whatever they could get. This was robbery, however, for some reason, we accepted it as part of the game.

© Lim Siang Jin