Red Rover

Red Rover (also known as the king's run and forcing the city gates) is a team game played primarily by children on playgrounds, requiring 10+ players.

The change basically consisted of merging pre-existing rules from other games with those of the original Red Rover.

[4][3] According to Katherine Barber, the name of the game could be based on the novel of The Red Rover by New York author James Fenimore Cooper.

It should be of no surprise that – for a chasing game – children prefer the name of a pirate[5] who ravages the British seas.

[7] It also appeared in 1916 in London Street Games, a book by Norman Douglas,[8] although British folklorists Iona and Peter Opie stated that no record of Red Rover has been found in the United Kingdom before 1922.

Years before, in 1938, rules for Red Rover had already been adopted from Chinese Wall, e. g. the marking of a narrow field in the center of the playground, which the catcher is not allowed to leave.

In March 1949, Warren E. Roberts of the Indiana University Folklore Institute explained that two versions of Red Rover exist.

[2] The same team game was described in 1884 – entitled Der König schickt Soldaten aus (the king sends out soldiers) – in the sixth edition of Spiele zur Übung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes by J. C. F. GutsMuths, published in Germany by Otto Schettler in co-operation with Friedrich Wilhelm Klumpp and Justus Carl Lion.

[19] In 1896, an English translation of the game named The King's Run was published in the United States by William Albin Stecher in the scholastic manual A Textbook of the German-American System of Gymnastics.

[21][22] A similar variant has been recorded in China in 1901 by professor Isaac Taylor Headland of the Peking University under the name Forcing the City Gates.

[24] In his article Child Life in China published in the Delineator magazine from January 1901, Headland annotated that this game was well-known to the majority of American children.

[16][26] The immediate goal for the chosen one is to run to the North team's line and break the chain (formed by the players' hands).

[32] Like British Bulldog the game of Red Rover has been banned by many schools because of the risk of potential physical harm.