Youths Flipping Over POGs : Games: Tournament in Irvine spotlights the fad imported from Hawaii. On Saturday, 200 youths ‘slammed kinis’ into stacks of milk caps, hoping to flip them.

Wanda Medina has become accustomed to the clink of “slamming kinis” in her Tustin home in the months since her 11-year-old son, Ryan, traded his yo-yo for the colorful milk caps known as POGs or Trovs.

“It’s quite the fad,” Medina said as she watched her son and about 200 other youths Saturday at the first tournament, held along a sidewalk at Parkview Shopping Center, to celebrate a craze that is sweeping Southern California. “When I was a little girl, the boys played for marbles.”

Sponsored by TROV USA, the milk cap tournament spotlights a fad that is usually played by handfuls of kids in schoolyards and at home.

Instead of shooting marbles, players slam the plastic “kinis” on colorfully decorated cardboard disks the size of silver dollars. The discs, known in various circles as POGs, a registered trademark, or Trovs, short for treasure troves, are identical to the flat circles once used to seal glass milk bottles.

The trick is to flip the Trovs over by bouncing the kinis off them. In the tournament Saturday, two players took turns throwing slammers at a stack of 11 Trovs. The first to flip six caps advanced to the next round.

Rules vary, with children playing for points or to keep the caps they’ve successfully flipped.

About 10,000 youngsters in the county have been caught up in the craze, either playing, trading or collecting the caps, according to promoters of Saturday’s tournament.

The thrill of competing and collecting is what many youths said makes the game so popular.

Ryan Medina said he loves the game because “you can get more POGs, and different ones. I’ve won about half my POGs,” he said.

Said 13-year-old Daniel Prepas of Newport Beach, who has amassed about 2,000 caps: “Every recess it’s the same. People keep playing.”

The game is similar to one played by youths more than a half century ago with the same kinds of small cardboard circles.

The flying-chips game was reborn in Hawaii about two years ago, when teachers at an Oahu elementary school rounded up milk covers from a dairy and introduced the game to their students. The disc of choice among the children was the container cap for a drink made of passion fruit, orange and guava, otherwise known as POG. Hence the name.

Locally, Orange stockbroker Bill Hodson became curious about the game last winter, and decided to import it to the mainland.

His TROV USA company has since organized more than 20 free tournaments for children of all ages throughout north Orange County and has become one of the major suppliers of milk caps in the state. A pack of five randomly mixed Trov caps sells for $1.25, while a Trov slammer costs $1.50.

Company employee John Coelho said he believes the game has staying power, and won’t wind up becoming just another fad.

“It’s a cross between marbles and baseball cards, which makes it so exciting,” he said. “You can play and collect.”

Nick Murray, 11, of Stanton tends to agree. “I think it’s going to be around for a while,” he said, while waiting for his turn to toss a slammer. “A lot of people I know play it. It’s a real popular game.”