expressions
I'm Belgian (Flemish) and over there we have an expression: "met iemands voeten spelen". Google translates it as I would: "Playing with one's feet". Googling around for a minute or so does not give me any results. So I was wondering. Do native English people understand what it means?
In Flemish it means something like: to tease, to joke around, to fool around… not sure if those are correct English.
The phrase is definitely head over heels - to be madly in love with someone typically used to describe a "new love" or "like a new love" condition.
I just met this girl and I'm head over heels in love.
or
She's lucky! They've been married for 20 years and he's still head over heels in love with her.
head over feet is never used this way. In fact as far as I know head over feet has no special idiomatic meaning and I can't come up with a situation where those three words would come out of my mouth in that order except for when reading this SE question outloud.
(As an aside- this is where Urban Dictionary and the like must be taken with a grain of salt because it does list head over feet to mean the same as head over heels, but no native speaker I know would ever utter it.)
This is what the Oxford Online dict says
play on: exploit (a weak or vulnerable point in someone): he played on his opponent’s nerves
play with: treat inconsiderately for one’s own amusement: she likes to play with people’s emotions
And another reference from there shows us that to play games on someone does imply some sort of trick which can be (or not) malicious (technically). But its mostly used in a non-positive sense.
So to ans your question, both play game on and play game with can suggest the malicious nature, depending on what context its being used in. E.g:
"Quit playing games (with me) and come to the point man!"
"He is playing a game on her to like him" -Studied deception
"He will never marry her! He is just playing games with her (for sex)" - suggesting studied deception again.
play games on is less commonly used, and even lesser commonly used in British Eng compared to US, as seen in the Google Ngrams below:
Best Answer
In English, "playing with one's feet" would be interpreted a meaning literally that; that someone is moving their own feet around in an agitated or fidgety way. It doesn't have any idiomatic meaning relating to fooling around.