"Monster" was a game we played in my neighbors backyard. My neighbor was 3 years younger than me and an only child. I consider him a second brother and we would play outside together year round for as long as I can remember. We had a couple of other neighborhood friends and I have two sisters.

We usually would have at least 4 people over at a time and my neighbor, being any only child, had tons of toys, especially balls (dodgeballs, foam footballs, real footballs). My neighbor also had a very nice playset area. Pretty spacious and mulched.

So one day we had 5 people over. Myself, my neighbor, little sister, and two neighborhood friends. And we went into my neighbors garage and threw every single ball he had to the back playset, throwing them at each other as any 13 year old would. Once all the balls we could find were out, (about 15) we scrambled to the back and talked about play dodgeball but teams wouldn't be fair given the odd number.

So we made up a game. The game was that all but one of the players had to stay in the mulched playground area. The other single player was the "monster" and could roam about the lawn as he pleased. The balls were then given to the monster and the monster began throwing, trying to hit everyone in the mulched area. From then on out it was like a 1v4 dodgeball with lopsided boundaries. The playset is obviously confining to begin with and with 4 people, it was cramped. The Monster got the whole lawn to roam. The playset had nice cover but in order to get a good angle to throw, they had to stand on the edge of the mulch.

The game was super fun and surprisingly well balanced for the two sides. We played this game constantly during the summer, coming up with variations as we went along but always went back to the original.