Retrospective: Crossbows and Catapults

My childhood circle of neighborhood friends was quite large and included boys of all ages, some of them much younger than myself. For example, when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons during the Christmas holidays of 1979, I was in the fifth grade, but my closest friends outside of school were a year or so younger than me. I also had friends who were younger still, often the little brothers of my other buddies. Being preteen boys, age didn't really matter all that much to us, because we all, more or less, enjoyed the same pastimes and it was always better to have more playmates. This was especially so after we started playing D&D and other RPGs.

Even so, my discovery of D&D coincided with – and probably facilitated – my abandonment of toys or anything that to my youthful self smacked of being "kid stuff." Children in those in-between years of 10 to 12 are, in my experience, quite concerned with appearing to be more "grown up" than they were just a few short years before. This concern can manifest in the ostentatious rejection of overt symbols of their childhood, like toys, games, and other entertainment that don't match up with their nebulous conception being older. That's certainly how it was for me.

Of course, having a friend group that included lots of younger boys provided a convenient excuse to transgress these arbitrary new boundaries between "kid" and "grown up" from time to time. My youngest friend was another's brother and he was about four years younger than me. Though he played D&D with us (and did so very well) he still unapologetically kept one foot in childhood, playing with those little G.I. Joe action figures – everyone knows the "real" G.I. Joe is 12 inches tall! – and other early '80s toys that the rest of us publicly eschewed. Our looking at and admiring his toys was no sin against our newfound maturity, since we weren't playing with them, you see. Such fine distinctions were very important to us and we did our Pharisaical best to maintain them.

Even so, there were egregious exceptions and Crossbows and Catapults was one of the bigger ones I can remember. Released in 1983, when I had just started high school, Crossbows and Catapults was simultaneously the kind of "family game" that I'd never have bought for myself, but was secretly happy had been given as a Christmas gift to my friend's kid brother. As we often did, my friends and I spent the Christmas break visiting one another's homes and passing judgment on our holiday hauls. We'd also use it as an opportunity to try out anything we deemed worthy of our time.

Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but I honestly cannot recall them. Even if I could, I'm fairly certain we never made much use of them, preferring to do our own thing with it. The game is supposed to be played by two players, but it was very easy to change this to two sides, which is what we did. Each side – Vikings or Barbarians – is given a number of little figurines, plastic blocks and structures, and a rubber band-powered ballista ("crossbow") and catapult that fired chunky discs that reminded me of checkers. To be played at all, you need a large, open area with a fairly flat surface, preferably an uncarpeted floor. We used to play on my friends' basement floor or on the ping-pong table we also used for Car Wars.  

As I said, Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but we preferred simply to build up walls and castles from the plastic bricks, place the figures, and then take turns shooting at them with our ballistas and catapults. We'd done this before with army men when we were younger and had great fun with it. Now, thanks to the cool little plastic siege engines included with the game, we could unleash a more potent – and accurate – kind of destruction upon the world. It was childish, of course, but that's probably why we had such fun with it. At that particular stage in our lives, on the cusp of or just entering our teen years, we thought were ready to leave our childhoods behind, even though, on some level, we clearly were not. Crossbows and Catapults afforded us the chance to be kids again without feeling self-conscious about it, which is why, to this day, I still have fond memories of this stupid game.