KerPlunk

KerPlunk is a children's game of physical skill invented by Eddy Goldfarb with Rene Soriano and first marketed by the Ideal Toy Company in 1967. Play centers on a clear plastic tube containing a lattice of thin plastic rods that hold a cluster of marbles suspended partway up the tube. Turn by turn, a player slides out a single rod, trying not to disturb the marbles resting above it; once a rod is touched it must be withdrawn completely, whether or not marbles fall as a result. Any marble that drops lands in that player's own collecting tray below the tube, and rounds continue until every rod is gone. The player whose tray holds the fewest fallen marbles at the end wins. The onomatopoeic name imitates the sound of marbles tumbling down the tube as a rod gives way. The set has been published over the decades by Milton Bradley and later by Hasbro in the United Kingdom and Mattel in the United States, and it remains a familiar early game built on a steady hand rather than reading or counting.