POGS

video review here! https://youtu.be/SgxPeWuzjEE

The 90s were home to some unusual fads. Gogos, yucky yo-balls, tamagotchis, clackers, beanie babies…for some reason we kids of the 90s latched onto these fervently and obediently. You weren’t anyone on the playground if you did have the latest toy trend or fad, these kept you part of the in crowd. This week, we’re looking at one of the stranger fads from the time, the obsessive collecting game known as pogs. 

Pogs hit the stores, or more accurately, hit the newspaper shops, in 1991, in shiny, foil packets. I remember getting my first pack thinking they were some sort of new gum or candy. Opening the packet to see cardboard discs with a captain caveman rip off on them, well, it was surprising to say the least. 

Pogs have a history much longer than the the 90s though. The game was based upon that of the Japanese game of Menko, a popular game from the Edo period of Japan, dating from around 1603 to 1867, yes, pogs go back THAT far. The game wasn’t played with cardboard discs however. Menko used wood, ceramic and even clay to make the game pieces, switching to cardboard pieces as the game gained popularity. Ceramic, wood and clay would still be used as the games slammers. The game is near identical to that of Pogs, opponents would bet their pieces against their opponents and flipping them over would result in winning those pieces. 

Menko would eventually switch to using cards, not round cards but rectangular cards, and this is believed to be the origin of collectable card series, talk about a varied history!

Being a popular game in Japan, it was immigration to Hawaii in the 20th century that would plant the seeds of the Pog game as we know it. Naturally, travellers from Japan to Hawaii would bring the game with them, and native Hawaiian children were quick to pick up on the game. They quickly adapted the game and used what they could find as game pieces, namely, cardboard milk bottle tops. I want to mention this now, I have NEVER seen a cardboard milk bottle top, foil yes, but never cardboard. In fact, i can’t remember the last time i saw a glass milk bottle…anyway, getting sidetracked here…

Menko spread like wildfire in Hawaii and was a very popular game, for many generations children of Hawaii would play the game and parents would pass down their bottle caps to their children, older caps being particularly prized. A teacher seeing the popularity of the game amongst her class would soon bring Menko into the global spotlight…



Blossom Galbiso noticed that the game was a great way to teach children mathematics and that the core fundamentals of the game required no athletic prowess. In 1991, she reintroduced the game of Menko to her class as a teaching aid, and the students so enraptured by the game quickly went about amassing as many cardboard milk bottle tops as they could. Urban legend claims that the packaging company that made the tops was inundated with requests for additional tops to grow the game. 

The name Pog comes from a Hawaiian fruit drink that, you guessed it, had cardboard tops for their bottles, the name POG being the acronym for Passionfruit Orange Guava. Naturally, tourists to Hawaii saw the the game being played and began taking the concept home with them. Pog was born, and it had a global foothold.

The game at it’s heart is very simple, and admittedly, pretty boring. You and your opponent or opponents each wager what pogs you’re willing to put into the stack, the ones you’re laying down. All the pogs are laid face down and stacked into a column. You then take it in turns to throw your slammer at the stack, sending the pogs flying up in the air. Any pogs that land face up, you get to keep, and the rest go back into the stack. The game continues until all are flipped right side up. Yes, you’ve probably seen the problem with this already. Gambling! For kids! What fun! Teach children from an early age what it is to bet and lose!
 

Someone with skill could take the whole lot, leaving you pogless. I heard in other schools Pogs were banned for such reasons, fights would break out, kids nicking pogs out each others pockets, bags, trays. Yeah, really fun game this one! I will say that aiming for the edge of the top Pog was the trick to getting them to flip…



In this barrel I have Pogs from nearly all series and a few others too. I won’t pretend to know which is from which series as honestly, as a kid, I didn’t care, even back then. The odd thing with Pogs is that even though they were collectable, there was no chart, no image of all 50 or 60 or 70 of a series so you knew which you were looking for. Yes, they were all numbered, but come on, it’d be nice to know which I was missing. 

The first wave Pogs quickly introduced Pogman, the aforementioned Captain Caveman wannabe. More often than not, Pogman would be in some kind of weird situation in the pictures, here he’s the bearskin for a palace guard, here he’s surfing. He was like a jack of all trades and definitely the mascot that the brand needed. In a pack of pogs, you’d get six standard Pogs and a slammer. Some of these slammers are ridiculously 90s in their design, patchwork neon colours, check, semi- aztec designs, check, the punisher skull, check. 



There were a number of series of pogs too, The World Tour, Chex, Wheetos, Wotsits. These things were practically unavoidable for a time, EVERYONE at some point had at least one pog, whether they wanted them or not.

It wasn’t long before other companies caught onto the popularity. Slammer Whammers was probably one of the bigger alternatives, and if I’m being perfectly honest, the art for their caps appealed to me far more, they were cooler, they were edgier, they were rad! I remember getting these from toys r us, yes, pogs had gotten to the stage where it wasn’t just a corner shop collection but a full fledged game. 

There were star wars pogs, Simpsons pogs, batman the animated series pogs, Reboot, The Mask, Toy Story, Biker Mice from Mars, NBA, seemingly every licence wanted to put themselves on these odd cardboard discs. Some Pogs were more interesting and intriguing than others, check out this lenticular buzz lightyear one, yeah, animated pogs. Even Chupa Chups, the lollypop company got in on the action!

Pogs came free with cereals and with bags of crisps and each had their own specific lines and series. Of all the pogs I have, the Wotsits series is the only one i have a complete collection of…that probably says more about my childhood diet than i care to think about. This slammer is from a lucky bag….you know the game had it’s foothold everywhere when you’re finding them in a lucky bag.



Then came along Tazos…Tazos were plastic discs that you could find within walkers crisps. They were EVERYWHERE. The likelihood of getting a Tazo in a bag was slimmer than not getting one. They were endorsed by Looney Tunes and later Star Wars, this was when the special editions were just hitting the theatres, ready to disappoint millions with shoddy CGI effects. Aside from being plastic, Tazos differed from Pogs in that they had these small notches in the side of them. You could slot them together to build…things? Structures? It was unusual to say the least, I don’t remember ever caring for this and the whole thing seemed gimmicky.

 

As mentioned before, slammers would come with every pack but there were a number of varieties. your bog standard pog slammer is about the thickness of two pogs but plastic. There were thicker slammers, like this England one here, look, it even has groves for your fingers in case you forgot how to hold a disc… The real king of slammers though were the metal ones. They would invariably cause you to win a game of pogs, the whole stack would go flying. Gamers would shy away from playing with you if you had a metal slammer and most would accuse it of cheating. Sore losing I say. Metal slammers also had the unfortunate problem of denting and marking the cardboard pogs. 



Of course, it wasn’t long before pirated pogs started to flood the market. Poison caps being the main culprit are easy to spot, the backs of them are left blank. Poison caps would invariably stick with three themes, skulls, 8-balls and the yin yang logo…my guess is due to them having absolutely no copyright infringement. Market sellers would sell bags of these for a few quid and you could really pad out your collection, though other players would want you to play with REAL pogs, not this imitation rubbish. Real pogs had the logo on the back, The World Pog Federation, yes this actually existed, and the federation actually held tournaments… for throwing plastic discs at cardboard. The mind boggles thinking about this.



Alas, the bubble had to burst at some point and I remember it vividly. Being on the playground, around 8-9 years old, a kid in the class above me throwing all his Pog collection in the air and yelling “scamble!!!!”, kids running to pick up what pogs they could. This started happening more and more and games of pogs less and less until everyone had moved onto the next thing….Gogos. 



Looking back on Pogs, it remains utterly perplexing why such a boring and dull game ever caught on the way it did. I get the collectability of the caps completely, and with there being such a wide variety and many licences going into the game, there really was something that appealed to every kid. But i question myself trying to explain to modern children why we were so obsessed with these cardboard discs, these pointless, useless cardboard discs and I can’t come up with any reasonable explaination. It really is a case of “you had to be there”. The images on them though really are a time capsule for a generation, the art, themes, jokes, licences really encapsulate the 90s in such a unique way. 

It goes without saying that I don’t play pogs any more. So why have I held on to this small barrel of them? They make great chips for playing cards. I might not play pogs any more, but I guess pogs taught me that gambling can be fun in small doses.