POG Slammers

Slammers were the muscle of the pog game—the same diameter as a pog, but thick and heavy, made of plastic, rubber, or metal, up to and including serious slabs of brass. The game: everyone antes pogs into a face-down stack, you hurl your slammer at it, and whatever flips face-up is yours to keep. Playing "for keeps" was the whole thrill. Metal and brass slammers flipped the most pogs, but they also dented the cardboard—which is why so many playgrounds house-ruled them as cheating or banned them from games outright. The World POG Federation's official plastic slammers even had their own name: kinis.

But slammers were never just equipment. Kids collected and traded them in their own right—holographic and prismatic foils, skulls, 8-balls, yin-yangs, dragons, oversized heavies and featherweight plastics with wild art. Pogs came and went by the tube-full, but your slammer was personal: the light plastic disc of a finesse player, the brass monster of a kid who played for blood, the glitter foil that existed purely to be admired.

The slammer economy died with its host. Schools in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Germany, and Iceland banned the game as kid-sized gambling—keepsies made that a hard charge to beat—and when the pog market collapsed around 1997, the slammers sank with it, leaving mixed tubes of caps and discs to fossilize in closets everywhere.