Spillikens

In a story by P. G. Wodehouse, we find this sentence: "Before making a shot, he would inspect his enormous bag of clubs and take out one after another, slowly, as if he were playing spillikens." An alternate spelling is spilikins. You might not have heard of this game, but it is another name for Jackstraws, a game played with a heap of small rods of wood, bone, or plastic, in which players try to remove one at a time without disturbing the others. We used to call it Pick-up Sticks.