Schools around the country are finding that it is easier to ban Pogs, the Hawaiian disk game that is supplanting children's pastimes like marbles, than to spend hours straightening out schoolyard fights.

In Wormleysburg, Pa., the raucous recess game is no longer permitted. "We have to put them away or we get sent to the principal's office," said Laura Arter, 10.

Pogs is often played for keeps, with the winners taking home the pog disks as spoils, a situation ripe for conflicts, said Mary Larcome, a fourth-grade teacher in Haverhill, Mass. "It takes away from your teaching time when you're trying to settle the problems," she said.

The game has also been discouraged or banned in schools from Windham, N.H., to Spokane, Wash.

There are various ways to play Pogs, also known as "milk caps," but generally each player has some of the waferlike cardboard disks and a heavier disk, usually made of plastic, called a "slammer." The disks are stacked and a player throws the slammer on them; in one version of the game, he keeps all the ones that flip over.