Jackstones
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a game played by one or more persons with from one to five small pebbles or bits of iron. Regular iron jackstones have six knobbed prongs. The game may be played in several ways. There is tossing and catching in all of them. The five stones may be held in the palm of the hand and thrown up together and caught on the back of the hand. The jack may be tossed up and caught alternately on the palm and the back of the hand, the player counting five for each successful catch. The player who reaches the highest score wins. Sometimes four stones are laid on the ground. The player tosses the jack and catches it, picking up a stone from the ground each time, while the jack is in the air. This method may be varied by holding the four stones in the hand and laying one on the ground between each toss and catch. Sometimes the jackstones are laid in a pile. The player arranges them in a figure, as the four corners of a square or in a straight line, this between tosses. The game of jackstones was well known to the ancients. The Greek poet Aristophanes mentions it as a form of amusement. Greek children played it with the knuckle bones of sheep. French children call the game "little bones." Scotch lads and lassies call the pebbles with which they play the game "chuckie-stanes." It is thought that jackstones is a corruption of "chuck-stones." See Games
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 description of tossing a "jack" and snatching stones from the ground while it is in the air still fits the game, but the American version has since acquired a piece of equipment the entry never mentions: the small rubber bouncing ball, which replaced the tossed jackstone in most play during the twentieth century, so that children now speak simply of "jacks" and count onesies, twosies and so on. The six-knobbed metal pieces Aiton's calls "regular iron jackstones" are now usually cast in plastic and sold with the ball in a net bag. The game's antiquity is better documented than in 1910 onesones (astragali) turn up in quantity from Greek and Roman sites and appear in ancient art and sculpture, confirming the link to the knucklebone play Aristophanes alludes to. What has changed most is prevalence: once a staple of schoolyards and sidewalks, jacks is now a nostalgia item rather than a game most children learn from other children.
Written for this edition, 2026.