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Submitted by Kenny O, who cheated by peeking at the shoes:
This was everyone’s favorite rainy day activity in elementary school. A few problems: If you weren’t popular, no one ever touched your thumb. Or, if a boy picked a girl, it could have been taken to mean that he liked her. Cheating was easy: All you had to do was open your eyes and steal a peek at the shoes when you felt your thumb get tapped. You could also tap your neighbor’s thumb to trick him.
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So I forget how this game goes….the person who pushes someones thumb down then goes back to their seat and pretends they were not the thumb pusher-downer? Wasn’t there some guessing of who it was or something like that?
The people pushing down thumbs would line up at the chalkboard. Then the people who’s thumbs were pushed down would have to guess who it was. If you were right, you got to to be a thumb pusher the next round.
i love this game!!! we used to play this in music class when we had nothing else to do. i never picked my best friend. too obvious…..
i played this ALL the time in church! (after…when we were waiting for our parents to pick us up) lol…im a girl….one kid (a guy…) always tapped mine… turns out it was always my neighbor and he always covered for them.
LOL, We used to play this game during gym class when it was raining outside. *On a side note, I don’t know why we didn’t just go inside for the day and use the gym…lazy ass gym teacher.* Well anyway I sucked royally at this game.
i would always cheat and look at peoples shoes.
LOL me too! I got made to sit out one day, b/c I wasn’t so good at not being obvious about it
LOL i did this all the time, no one ever figured it out. Ahh the good old days…
You mean “Heads Down, Thumbs Up”?
That’s the name I know it by and it’s a name that makes much more sense.
It’s called “Heads Up, Seven Up” because when you say that the seven people who got their thumbs tapped stand up, and everyone else puts their head up.
I always knew it as a variation on “Seven Up”
I knew it as both… It was kinda fun.
I always did that too…
xD
I guess the shoe trick wouldn’t work so well when everyone wears a uniform, like in the picture.
I remember almost falling asleep on some particularly long turns of this game.
Man I wanna go back to 5th grade and play this again.
We used to call it “Heads Down Thumbs Up”.
Wow, I hadn’t thought about this game since in grammar school! Remember playing it in the 2nd or 3rd grade.
heh… ive been to a “heads up seven up” party. we all drank 7 up afterwords
I used to loove this game!!
I always cheated too and looked at people’s shoes :p
I remember playing this in school. The teacher made us keep our heads centered on the desk to stop peekers.
I also remember folder forts for test day. It wasn’t until fifth grade that the teacher started checking the folders to make sure no one had the ones with multiplication tables on the inside flaps.
i loved this game! i remember on rainy days my teacher would have us vote on games to play inside during recess and i was so happy when 7-up would win!
I hated this game because the only kids that would touch my thumb were the really weird kids who would make a sound when they tapped you. What’s the challenge in that? And if you guessed wrong all the kids would make fun of you. Bastards.
I hated it too for the same reason, and because I knew those kids never washed their hands. i don’t want their dick cheese on my thumb!
We always called it just “Seven Up” but the teacher would say “OK, heads up, seven up!” I remember playing this up through 8th grade. The caption is right: this was usually played on rainy days during our normal recess period.
We called it Seven Up, and what’s with the thumbs? Our tappers tapped your head.
Everyone had a different variation of it, I guess. I remember it being you gave a thumbs-up, someone tapped it, you put it down, then the teacher called out “Heads up, Seven up!”. Those seven who were tapped stand up, guess who tapped them, and if they guess right, they got to tap someone in the next round, and the previous tapper has to sit down.
I remember in one class we played it like that, but if your thumb was tapped, you had to raise your hand. Hurt like hell after a while.
How is this old? I still play this, and I haven’t graduated middle school yet. They took the fun out of cheating, however. People these days always poke their head under to make sure you’re not looking. Suddenly, my skill at this game plummets!
Yeah, I never got picked when we played this. You pick your nose one time…
I remember this game so damn much. Loved playing it but it was always fraught with massive anxiety because 1) what if my class crush tapped my thumb? and 2) what if he didn’t? and 3) what if my thumb was tapped by someone else but he was up there at the front and I picked him because he was my crush but he shook his head and that was heartbreak because it showed he didn’t crush on me back because he didn’t tap my thumb when he had a chance to do so?!?!?! Oh, nostalgia.
I remember this, but nobody ever picked me and no matter what I did people could always guess me after I picked them. I bet they were cheating >:(
Ugh, I hated this game as a kid, I could never win.
This game was awesome. It was so easy to cheat by looking at the shoes, I admit to doing it a few times.
I remember the first time I played this. I’d moved from England about a year prior so I was still somewhat new to my school and we didn’t play this game over there. Everyone in my class knew the rules to the game already (it was 2nd grade and they’d been playing since kindergarten) and I had no idea what this game was about. I had to have it explained to me before we played.
Someone on Yahoo Answers asked about the rules for this game a few months ago. Glad to know I remembered the rules right!