A popular English Christmas game in which a blind-folded player must catch someone and indentify him or her. The fun lies in coming tantalizingly close to the player without getting caught. In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens the guests of Scrooge’s nephew Fred play the game in such a way as to further the possibilities of romance:
There was first a game at blind-man’s buff. Of course there was. And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge’s nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went he. He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn’t catch anybody else. If you had fallen up against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn’t fair; and it really was not. But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her neck; was vile, monstrous. No doubt she told him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in office, they were so very confidential together, behind the curtains.
An eighteenth-century comment on a darker side of the game reveals: “[T]hen it is lawful to set any thing in the way for Folks to tumble over, whether it be to break Arms, Legs, or Heads, ’tis no matter, for Neck‑or nothing, the Devil loves no Cripples.—This Play, I am told, was first set on foot by the Country Bone‑setters.”
A less boiterous variation was called Shadow-Buff. A “blind man” would sit on one side of a white sheet or tablecloth with a bright light shining on the other side. He would attempt to guess the identity of other players as they walked past the sheet casting shadows.