When the words are incorporated into a game by children, a caller delivers the lines and the first person responding names the item he will give.
G. K. Chesterton wrote of the poem as a "beggars' rhyme" during his childhood in late nineteenth-century London, and quoted the words as thus: Here comes a poor soldier from Botany Bay: What have you got to give him to-day?
[2] Mentions of children's games in the late 19th century indicate a variation involving the prohibition of predetermined taboo words.
The child playing the soldier may beg items of clothing and then ask what colours they are, or otherwise enter into a conversation in the hope that the child questioned will forget what has been agreed, in which case they must pay a forfeit.
[1][3][4] Various other games incorporating the rhyme emerged in the twentieth century, most local adaptations that replaced the "old soldier from Botany Bay" with an "old woman from Botany Bay.