Spectacular Deaths

My recent post about strange games to play in the sand dunes led to friend and correspondent Maurice Tweddle to write in and remind me of a game that we used to play together as callow youths: Spectacular Deaths. Although it can be played anywhere with soft ground the perfect environment is the sand dune.
The premise of the game is simple, one must die in response to the other player's imaginary gunfire, and the death must be as spectacular as possible. This leads to much clutching of chests, cartwheeling through the air, falling backwards off the tops of dunes, jerking your body in response to machine gun fire and perfecting the head snap whiplash response to the superbly accurate hit man hiding behind the pampas grass. And once one has mastered all these spectacular deaths there is the ultimate dune death of the hand-grenade lobbed into the sand bunker: a leap through the air with forward somersault to land triumphant (and dead) on your back.

strange games no:139