Menko literally means “small object with a
face” in Japanese. In its current
and more modern context, menko refers to a piece of cardboard with some sort of
picture on the front side of it. The rules of menko are extremely simple,
but first we must define menko as both the game and the actual pieces that are
used to play the game. So we literally
use menko to play menko. The term sumo
cards and sumo menko have been used interchangeably by many references, but as
you will see in later sections, sumo menko are vastly different from sumo
cards. This Sumo Menko & Card
Checklist will cover all facets of sumo menko, cards, karuta, bookmarks,
stickers, prize cards and just about any collectible piece of cardboard or
paper relating to sumo although its primary focus is on sumo menko.
For those that lived through the POG milk cap craze of the 1980s and 1990s you’ll be
very familiar with how menko is played.
The basic rules of menko are simple.
Menko is very much like marbles where any number of kids can play and
they each bring their own menko to the “battlefield.” Each child contributes the same amount of
menko to the game and one of the children puts up all the menko into one stack
on the ground. Some game variations have
all the menko individually on the ground and not in a single stack at the
beginning of the game. Ideally, each child
will also have a slammer menko that is many times heavier than a regular
menko. They will use this slammer to try
and flip as many regular menko over from the stack by throwing the slammer
menko into the battlefield and on top of the cards.
There are two other popular alternate rules to
menko that don’t involve slamming and battling in the traditional sense. The first and most popular version is using
the Gu-Choki-Pa (Rock-Scissors-Paper)
mark on the back of the menko. Children
would have a stack of menko and play very much like the American children’s
version of War. They would turn over the
top card and try and defeat their opponent’s menko by having a more powerful Gu-Choki-Pa mark. For example, Rock beats Scissors, Scissors
beats Paper and Paper beats Rock. Paper
menko were sporadically printed with Gu-Choki-Pa
marks starting in the late 1930s and then almost every set from 1946 on had
them. See Chapter 10 for more
information and some picture examples of Gu-Choki-Pa
marks.
The other fun alternative version is to use the
Fighting Number on back to defeat their opponents. There are small variations to this
alternative version, but the most common was to try and outnumber, or get a
higher number than their opponent’s Fighting Number. Since most Fighting Numbers were not the same
number of digits, many times kids would pick a certain digit on each menko, for
example the 3rd, 5th or 6th digit, and use
that digit to do battle with. Paper
menko from the very beginning had Fighting Numbers associated with them and
were used in many different ways as described in Chapter 10. Chapter 10 also has example pictures to give
you a better idea of what Fighting Numbers looked like on the back of a menko.
Another way to play with menko was to stand them
up on a cardboard or wooden surface against each other so they'd lean on each
other without falling. Then players would tap the surface they were on
and try to make one of the menko topple over onto the other one. The one that landed on top was declared the
winner. This style of play was popular
with the rikishi series(R-series)
menko. In fact, a few of the R-series
menko in the 1950s were marketed with the Japanese word “gamble” right on the
sheets of menko along with visual rules on how to play this game. R-series menko are explained in Chapter 17 of
this book.
You could play with the war themed words on the
back as well. For example, the marshal
beats the infantry, but is defeated by the spy.
However, the infantry defeats the spy and so on. There are dozens of words and is detailed
more later on in the next chapter.
Menko weren’t always used to play the game
menko. In fact, a popular way to use
menko was to shoot them up into the air with rubber bands. Specific menko were made for this and were
called “flying menko”. These menko have
distinct airplane or bird shapes. Many
of the larger round menko that you see from the 1930s and 1940s were actually
made to shoot up in the air. Additionally,
many of the smaller circle menko were made to shoot up in the air with special
shooters. These menko were called
Romenko. What games the kids actually played
by shooting the menko is still uncertain and needs some more research, but
probably involved making your menko go the highest or farthest.
No comments:
Post a Comment