The Origins of 6 Popular Backyard Games

Croquet is a game where players use mallets to knock heavy balls across a lawn and through a series of hoops. Though it may have evolved from earlier games, the first recorded mention of croquet appears in 1856, the year toy dealer Isaac Spratt registered a set of rules for a game called “croquet” in London. The game quickly became popular in England, where the sixth earl of Essex held fancy croquet parties. It also became popular in other countries like the United States.

Over the next several decades, croquet went in and out of popularity, with one of the high points being its inclusion in the 1900 Paris Olympics. The game experienced a revival in the United States in 1977, when industrial designer Jack Osborn founded the United States Croquet Association. Even as more people began to play croque, it retained a reputation as an upper-class sport (in the 1988 movie Heathers, the wealthy mean girls play croquet). More recently, croquet enthusiasts have tried to promote the game as an accessible sport that is easy to pick up.

At a Thanksgiving party in 1937, a teenage couple in California entertained themselves by throwing a popcorn container lid back and forth. A year later, the couple—Fred Morrison and Lu Nay—were playing the same game with a cake pan on a beach in Santa Monica when someone offered to pay them 25 cents for their improvised toy. Fred later recalled that this was notable, because a cake pan only cost around five cents.

Soon after, Fred and Lu began selling cake pans for a quarter in Santa Monica (and also married each other). They paused their business when Fred went to Europe to fight in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. When Fred returned, he worked as a carpenter and began designing a new disc toy. In 1948, he started selling the “Flyin-Saucer,” whose name capitalized on recently reported UFO sightings.

Fred later took his idea to the Wham-O Toy Company, and in 1957, it began selling his invention as the “Pluto Platter.” The next year, Wham-O changed the name to “Frisbee,” a reference to the Frisbie Pie Company pans that college students in New England liked to throw back and forth for sport. The toy caught on, and Frisbee-throwing became a popular backyard activity. Later, the disc also became a key part of a sport known as ultimate Frisbee.

Like croquet, badminton is a game that may have evolved from earlier sports, but emerged in its current form in the mid-19th century. Histories of badminton usually cite the first players as British army officers in occupied India. However, the game gets its current name from the English village of Badminton, where guests of the ninth Duke of Beaufort played the sport in the 1870s. After this, the game quickly became popular in England and spread to other countries.

In badminton, players use rackets to hit a shuttlecock (or birdie) over a net. The shuttlecock is much lighter than most outdoor sports balls, and is easily manipulated by wind—which may explain why professional badminton became an indoor sport. In the postwar United States, badminton became more popular as a casual backyard game, to the chagrin of many professional players.

In 1953, a retired semi-pro baseball pitcher named David Nelson Mullany decided to design a ball that was easier for kids like his 12-year-old son to throw with a curve. Mullany constructed a hollow plastic ball with eight oblong slots on one side. He and his son came up with the name “Wiffle ball” because whenever a neighborhood kid struck out playing baseball, the others would say the batter had “whiffed.”

Mullany mortgaged his house to fund his invention, and began selling Wiffle balls out of a station wagon. In 1959, he opened a factory in Shelton, Connecticut to manufacture Wiffle balls, as well as plastic Wiffle bats to go with them. Today, Wiffle ball has its own game rules and tournaments for both children and adults, and the Shelton factory continues to manufacture all official Wiffle balls.

Horseshoe-throwing games date to at least the 19th century in the United States, where these games were often known as “quoits” (the name for a similar British ring-throwing game). In a 1905 letter to the editor of the New York paper The Sun, Nebraska Governor John H. Mickey claimed he was “the best horseshoe thrower at the State House” because he had played the game since childhood (he was born in 1845).

In the early 20th century, Americans formed various horseshoe and quoit associations and held tournaments for avid players. In these games, players competed to throw metal horseshoes around a stake in the ground. Players could still earn points by throwing horseshoes close to the stake, leading baseball player and manager Frank Robinson to famously remark in 1971: “Close don’t count in baseball. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Lawn darts hold the dubious distinction of being the only backyard game on this list that changed due to a government ban. Combining aspects of horseshoes and darts, the game initially involved throwing large pointed darts toward plastic rings on the ground. Lawn darts became a popular backyard game in the 1950s, but drew controversy in the 1980s after a 7-year-old died when a lawn dart pierced her skull.

In 1988, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the sale of lawn darts capable of puncturing skulls, citing the deaths of the 7-year-old and two other children, as well as thousands of emergency room visits. Since then, manufacturers have sold lawn darts with blunted plastic tips, but the backyard game is no longer as popular as it was before the ban.