Yes, you read that headline right: a pog competition.
The Slam For Hope, taking place in Vancouver on Saturday, July 26, is raising money for Variety Children’s Charity.
If you're unfamiliar, pogs are those small, circular playing pieces that featured super awesome and colourful pictures of everything from well-known cartoons to made-up designs. They were popular for a short time in the '90s. Remember?
There were even business cards available in pog form.
"It’s been interesting to look through them after a couple decades of not seeing pogs, because the amount of just strange, disconnected images on them is unlike any other toy product I can think of," event organizer Steve Masuch told The Huffington Post B.C. in an email.
"A lot of traditional kids' games didn't have any particular imagery (marbles, Jacks), and recent kids games are heavily branded and kept that way through technological means (like Skylanders). [But] Pogs were an easy game for manufacturers to produce material for.
"Some of those images just became really common as part of the visual vocabulary of the game without being attached to anything else: eight ball, poison, skull, yin-yang, sawtoothed edges, stuff like that."
Masuch collected some original pogs from Craigslist just for fun, and then came up with the idea for the tournament. That's when he started collecting enough to give out to everyone (each contestant is given 10 pogs, plus a slammer, to compete with and take home after).
It is a simple game: Players stack the pogs face-down between them and take turns throwing their slammer (a heavier Pog) onto the stack, trying to knock the pogs off. The throwing player collects any pieces that fall face up.
The remaining pogs are then re-stacked, and the next player takes a shot. The one with the most pogs at the end wins the game and, traditionally, keeps all of the pieces they collected.
Masuch is hoping to gather about 25 contestants in Slam For Hope, with an entry fee of $15, with at least $10 going to the charity.
Take a look at some of the pogs in Masuch's collection:
Vancouver Pog Tournament
And if you need it, here's a refresher:
