Huckle buckle beanstalk

Huckle Buckle Beanbag, also called Hide the Object or Hide the Key, is a childhood game which involves the hiding and seeking of an object. It is a variation of a traditional parlour game which can be played with two or more players, one being the hider, or the person who is "it," and the other person or persons being seekers. The game has also been known as Hot Buttered Beans in the US since at least 1830 and as Hunt the Thimble, Hide the Thimble or Hide the Handkerchief in both the US and the UK. William Wells Newell described a version called Thimble in Sight in his 1883 Games and Songs of American Children. The game is known in various European countries.

The seekers must cover their eyes and ears or leave the designated game area while the hider hides a small, pre-selected object. When the hider says to come and find it, or after the seekers have counted to a specific number, usually sixty or one-hundred, the seekers come out and attempt to be the first to find the object. When a seeker has the object in hand, he can alert the other players of his success by yelling "huckle buckle beanstalk!" This game is promoted as a fun, safe rainy-day game for young children.

A variation of the game has the person who finds the object, continue by pretending to look for the object and then call out "Huckle Buckle Bean Stalk" to draw the other seekers attention away from the objects location. As the other seekers find the object, they perform the same deception until all the seekers have found the object. The winners take pride in how quickly they find the object and how much time passes between them and the next player who calls out "Huckle Buckle Bean Stalk".

Brian Sutton-Smith and other writers put this in a category of "central person" games which give one individual child a central role. The set-up can be reversed with that role given to a single seeker, while all the other players try to keep an object hidden from the odd-one-out, either by sending him out of the room while hiding it, or by passing it round behind their backs. This is a common way of organising 'Hide the Key' or 'Hunt the Slipper'.

Games played like this, sometimes with children forming a circle round the seeker, sometimes with one child blindfolded, pre-date Victorian parlour games. In 1838 Hunt the Slipper, played as a single-seeker circle game, was said by one writer to be "nearly out of fashion" in Southern England. In 1766 Oliver Goldsmith described it being played in The Vicar of Wakefield, calling it a "primaeval pastime".

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