Pogs: The Milkcap Guide

by Tommi Lewis, Craig Cameron Olsen (Photographer)

If you are a parent or kid and the milkcap or Pog craze hasn't hit your household, just wait a minute-it will. Milkcaps are collectibles and they're also used in games that are now taking off among kids nationwide. And as they continue to grow in popularity and intensity, kids everywhere want to know more about them. Pogs: The Milkcap Guide by Tommi Lewis is the ultimate book about collectible caps, slammers, and the games that you can play with them.

The Phenomenon started in Hawaii where kids began to collect milkcaps and play a game with them which is similar to shooting marbles. The name Pog is an acronym for Passion Orange Guava, a popular juice from Hawaii that spawned the collectible caps. Cap collecting caught on there with such fervor that in the early '90s, manufacturers started producing and selling millions of glossy, colorful discs to replace the milkcaps. These quickly became a hot trading item. And Pogs then spread to kids on the West Coast, before exploding across the rest of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

Pogs: The Milkcap Guide gives kids valuable collecting facts, step by step instructions for more than a dozen game variations, tournament information, as well as highlights of the ultimate collections, the most expensive, and the rarest milkcaps. As an added bonus, kids get a full color section featuring the Hot Cap Gallery.


Photography by Craig Cameron Olsen

109 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

Reviews

[Mutant Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here you'll read about the history of the fad, different brands of caps on the market, rules, lingo, and I imagine everything you should know before getting started playing pogs. It's full of corny rules that leave you scratching your head like "No hitting the table to knock the caps over" and "Another person can't substitute for a player at any time." The highlight of this book, though, are the game variatons, which are just straight up broken or make no sense. "If the caps fly out of a pile in tornado-like formation, the hitter gets to keep the stack." How do you decide what that looks like? "If a player shows a yin yang slammer, this means the player can make up his or her own rules." Yeah, that's a fair one. Or how about this favorite? "When someone who is not playing reaches in and grabs the slammer out of the air, then the outsider gets to keep the slammer." Yeah, that's right. A stranger robbed you? Don't even get mad about it. It's all part of the game. It's silly, and most of the info here isn't relevant to anyone anymore, but it serves as an amusing time capsule from the 90's and who knows? maybe Pogs will make a big comeback some day.