A Game of Jacks Trivia Quiz

Answer: sheep

Other cultures used objects such as stones, seashells and seeds as the items to be scattered or thrown into the air and collected. These games were not played only by children, they were also commonly a gambling game among adults to challenge each other in manual dexterity. When I moved to Australia, I found the game played with plastic pieces shaped to recall the knucklebone origins of the game. The name jack seems to have derived from jackstone (itself evolving from checkstone), used in the 18th century. Modern jacks (in North America) are small metal objects with 5 or 6 prongs projecting from a central point, allowing them to sit in a stable position on the ground.

Just as the objects used to play the game vary, so do the rules of play. There is always a component of throwing something in the air and collecting items with the hands, but sometimes it is the jacks that are thrown and caught, or one jack tossed into the air to give the player a fixed amount of time to collect others and catch it before it hits the ground. I will be describing play that involves throwing a small bouncy ball into the air to provide the timing element.

If you are playing with a ball, you still need to sort out whether it is allowed to bounce or not. Whichever is the norm, the other may be an option for a special variation that can be undertaken after the basic stage of the game has been completed. You also need to decide whether the ball is to be thrown and caught in one hand, while the jacks are collected with the other, or whether both tasks must be completed with the same hand. Again, whichever of these is the norm, the alternative may be a special variation, as is a requirement that you reverse hands, using your less dominant hand to complete the actions you would normally complete with the dominant hand. This is called playing left-handed, but for those of us who are left-handed, it means using the right hand.

Answer: tumble turn

In a flip turn, the swimmer performs an underwater somersault as the wall gets near, so that the actual contact is made with the feet, which can then immediately be used to push off from the wall and gain momentum. An open turn, by contrast, involves making contact with the hands. The tumble turn is preferred as being much faster and more efficient (so is universally used in freestyle and backstroke), but the open turn is required for some strokes, specifically the breaststroke and the butterfly.

The flip to start a game of jacks involves throwing an agreed-on number of jacks in the air and catching as many as possible on the back of your hand (or hands, if you are allowing a two-hand catch) before they land. Whoever catches the most plays first; a tie requires a re-flip.

Answer: Elvis Presley

Elvis played two roles in this film: an air force pilot named Josh Morgan, and his blond (but otherwise nearly identical) third cousin Jodie Tatum, a hillbilly from whose father the military want to arrange to lease some land. Those aren't the only cousins - Elvis also becomes romantically involved with another distant cousin, Azalea, played by Yvonne Craig. There is a predictable amount of silliness between the local maids and the soldiers in the mission, and plenty of Elvis singing, but the movie did not get a great reception from critics, who found the template from which Elvis films were being produced was growing stale.

Gene Nelson directed the film, while Fred Wise and Bill Giant were among the writers responsible for the two different songs titled 'Kissin' Cousins' used in the movie.

The rules for determining an acceptable layout for the start of a turn is variable, but made clear for everyone before the start of a game. One requirement is usually that the player cannot cover all of the jacks with their hand fully extended - there must be at least one jack that cannot be touched. The exact details of Kissies in play also needs to be decided on; sometimes a rethrow is compulsory, but most times it is optional. If you are trying to collect all of the jacks in a single go, leaving them is great, but if you need to pick them up one at a time, you will definitely want to separate them.

Answer: full body piece of clothing resembling an animal

All of these are onesies, a term that originally was a brand name for the child's garment described in an incorrect option, but which came to be applied to an adaptation of the jumpsuit as streetwear - first called adult onesies as a disparaging reference, which got shortened to onesie as their popularity kept them around. The onesie worn as thermal underwear can be called just that, or may be referred to as a Union suit (although that term dates back a century or more), while the blanket with sleeves sold for warm lounging around the house has a number of brand names, such as Snuggie.

The kigurumi can also be called cosplay pajamas, as the resemblance to an animal was originally seen as appropriate only for sporting mascots or people otherwise engaged in a costumed activity - and they usually included an animal head mask as part of the outfit. They have, however, gained popularity as streetwear, for reasons best known to those who wear them.

A game of jacks usually requires players to collect all the jacks one at a time, then two at a time, then three at a time, all the way up to the total number in play - which is commonly ten in the North American game, but can be fewer or more. If the number of jacks is not a multiple of the number to be collected in a round, the leftovers are collected at the end as the final step in that round.

Answer: No

A number of sports and games use the word foul to describe an action that is not allowed by the rules of the game. But when the word is used as an adjective to describe something, it means that the object being described is disgusting, repellent, possibly noxious or toxic. That being the case, I would certainly hope that nobody describes my carefully prepared feast that way!

There are a number of ways to commit a foul in jacks. The most common ones are letting the ball bounce (or bounce more than once, or not at all, if you are in a variant for which that is applicable) or failing to pick up the correct number of jacks in one sweep. Another is dropping a jack after it has been picked up but before it has been properly placed out of play. Then there is tipping, which means moving a jack that you do not pick up in that sweep. Avoiding tipping is one of the factors to be considered when making the original spread of jacks: if they are too close together, tipping becomes likely, but if they are too spread out it can be hard to reach them all without moving from your position (which may be one of the rules of your game).

Answer: Othello

Othello is a variant, patented in 1971, of the older game Reversi, developed in the 1880s. Its creation is disputed, with two Englishmen both claiming to have invented it, and other sources suggesting it could be much older - it has a clear relationship to the Japanese game of Gomoku, in which black and white stones are placed on the points of a Go board, and players try to establish a line of five in a row of their colour.

Reversi introduces the element of change - when one player places a piece of their own on either end of a string of the opposite colour, the opponent's pieces are 'captured', and the two-sided discs are turned over to show the new owner's side. The two sides are called light and dark, but all that matters is that they be clearly different. You could, for example, use coins with one player as heads and the other as tails. Each play must involve the creation of a reverse; if there is no way to place a piece that will make that happen, the move must be passed. The goal is to have more discs of your colour than your opponent after all pieces have been played. There are 64 discs, to be placed on a board with 64 squares, such as a chess board. The game ends when all squares are covered, or when neither player has a legitimate move available.

Othello uses disks that are white on one side and black on the other, with a board that is bright green. These colours are intended to evoke Shakespeare's play 'Othello', in which the drama develops between Othello (a Moor, hence assumed to have darker skin than his nemesis) and Iago, the villain who plays on Othello's jealousy (the green-eyed monster) to lead him to destroy the love of his life, Desdemona. It seems a bit far-fetched as an analogy, but the strategy game works a treat!

In jacks, the entire game may be played in reverse, or it may be stipulated that players must first complete an ascending sequence, then reverse the pattern and complete a descending one. That may be the end of the game, or players may then proceed to play a stipulated number of fancy variants.

Answer: Natasha Romanoff

Natalia Alianovna Romanova, also called Natasha Romanoff, is actually just one of the names used in the various iterations of the Marvel universe for a character known as Black Widow. The first one, Claire Voyant, appeared in 'Mystic Comics' #4 (Aug. 1940), as a totally unrelated character to later bearers of the name. Natasha Romanoff first appeared in 'Tales of Suspense' #52 (April 1964) and has since appeared in multiple media, including the 2021 film in which she was played by Scarlett Johansson. She was originally a villain, spying for the USSR, but subsequently defected to the US and joined the intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D., where she became partners with Daredevil. Her career has seen her change alignments many times, creating a deep sense of ambiguity in the character.

Sometimes Black Widow is used as the format for an entire game of jacks, but it can also be one of the special variants selected to be played after the basic sequence has been completed. If you want to make the game go on for a long time on a rainy afternoon, you can specify that players need to complete this tricky variant as one of the specials. It is tricky because you have to start all over if you foul, and cannot just pick it up where you left off. With ten jacks, that means completing 20 rounds without any errors.

Answer: Marasca

While all of these are now seen treated to produce a bright red cherry served in cocktails (and on ice cream sundaes), the original was the marasca cherry, grown in Dalmatia. The cherries were preserved in maraschino, a liqueur made from the same type of cherry. This is still considered the highest quality of maraschino cherry in much of the world, but in the US the advent of Prohibition led to the development of alternative preservation techniques involving brine instead of alcohol, and the high cost of the marasca cherries led to the use of other types, such as those listed as incorrect options. In 1940, the US Food and Drug Administration as defined maraschino cherries as "cherries which have been dyed red, infused with sugar, and packed in a sugar syrup flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor", replacing the 1912 definition from the US Department of Agriculture that they were "marasca cherries preserved in maraschino".

When playing the Cherries in a Basket special variant, players can be further handicapped by adding a requirement that they hold the jacks in their dominant hand (meaning they use the less favoured hand to toss the ball, collect the jacks, and place them in the receptacle hand and catch the ball). Some players require that the cherries be actually placed in the hand, not just thrown at it, and that the basket hand be kept stationary during the process. The variant is played for the full sequence from one to ten (or however many jacks are being used in the game).

Answer: yoyo

A yoyo consists of two discs connected by an axle around which a length of string is wound. Play then consists of spinning the yoyo as the string is allowed to unwind, then getting it to wind up again. Some of us find just that to be sufficient challenge, but more coordinated players can go on to perform a range of stunts in the process. The simplest of these is sleeping (only possible with a yoyo that has the string looped around the axle rather than knotted onto it), which means you let the yoyo spin for a while at the bottom of its movement before recalling it. Slightly more advanced is Walking the Dog, in which you let the sleeping yoyo roll across the floor. Other more complex stunts include Around the World. which involves swinging the yoyo in a vertical circle while the string is unrolled.

The jacks variant Around the World requires players to throw the ball then make a circle around it with the throwing hand before it bounces, while collecting jacks with the other hand.

Answer: Egypt

Discovered in 1999, the stables are at a site known as Piramesses (meaning House of Ramesses) in the Nile delta. They have been dated to the time of Ramesses II (also known as Ramses the Great), around 1300BCE. They were quite impressive, with a floor area of around 17,000 square metres, and holding over 450 horses at a time. One of the more intriguing features was the fact that each of the points where a horse could be tethered had a cistern nearby, with the floor sloping slightly towards it. It was originally thought that this was simply a way of collecting the horse urine for use after it drained across the floor (possibly as a fertiliser), but some have suggested that the horses of the day (smaller than our modern ones) would have been positioned in such a way when tethered that the cistern acted as a toilet, allowing the animals to avoid having to stand in pools of their own urine. Of course, there would still have been plenty of manure!

In the jacks variant, the stable is formed by placing the hand palm-down then bending the fingers until only the fingertips and the wrist rest on the playing surface. The thumb protrudes in front of the opening, creating the stable door, which is closed after each set of jacks is slid inside. Players decide in advance whether the thumb can be used to scoop the jacks in, or whether they must all be inside on their own. As in most variants, play involves completing the sequence from one jack at a time up to all of them in a single sweep.