My household took the plunge through a circuitous course. I had never actually played the game until four of us were looking to try a game out on the Tabletop Simulator we had all gotten into as a means of keeping our gaming going during the COVID isolation. TTS is a PC app you can buy from online game distributor Steam, which creates a simulated 3D virtual tabletop with proper physics applied to it.
Our primary motivation for collectively obtaining this product was boardgaming, particularly games like Formula Dé, which can support up to ten players, but seeing how well the physics worked for the many dice made us curious about games with a more physical dimension.
 |
| Screen capture courtesy of Earl Woods and The Earliad! |
We pulled up a (virtual) board and sorted out the default settings (which actually prevent pieces from being moved once placed, normally a great feature!). Earl. who grew up with crokinole being the game of choice at holiday gatherings and such, walked us through the rules. The four of us had a great time, caroming the little discs (also called biscuits) across the digital playing surface.
Afterwards, I told Audrey about the great time we'd had and asked if she'd ever played, but her experience was similar to mine - had come across the board many a time, but either the discs were missing, or no one else wanted to play, or nobody knew the rules so it quickly devolved into a basic and boring game of drawing towa4rd the button like in curling.
Discovering that your shot only stays on the board if it strikes a disc from the opposing team was a revelation. With all the games we own, very few classic ones have an appeal to our household, but a strategic dexterity game that is simple to learn, difficult to master and fairly quick to set up really spoke to us. The fact that crokinole is yet another game invented in Canada, with a legacy extending all the way back to 1876, and which still holds its world championships in Tavistock Ontario, was just the icing on the cake.
And so it was on Friday that Audrey and I drove to Mission Fun & Games on Friday to pick up a crokinole board.
We stopped at Jack's Burger Shack on the way back and brought home way too much food, so it was some time before we could really get into it. But Audrey and I got a fair number of games in over the afternoon, looked up some of the rules (do ricochets stay on the table? how do you score biscuits that are on the line?) and got a handle on some of the finer points of the game.
Taking video for fun came in handy at one point, proving that one of my discs had moved when I could have sworn Audrey had missed!
The occasional brilliant shot would be immediately followed by a stunner of a scratch, gliding across the table without making contact with anything.
The best part came when Fenya was travelling through the basement, saw what the two of us were doing and asked, "so, this is...Date Day?"
"Yeah..." we both answered, maybe a little defensively.
Our oldest chuckled and shook her head as she walked away, "You nerds are adorable."
Tonight the four of us sat down for our first family game, with Audrey and Fenya beating Glory and I definitively, despite it being Fenya's very first game.
It was a lot of fun, if perhaps a teensy bit more competitive than we'd expected. Still, maybe a game so associated with cabins will be well-suited to helping us fend off cabin fever, eh?
UPDATED
And apparently, I am not the only one who thinks so - mere hours after posting this blog, the gaming site Polygon published an article called "Make 2020 the Year of Crokinole." The zeitgeist and I have never been affable up until now, but good grief, am I ahead of the curve for something?
Our crokinole board disappears for long periods of time, then reappears for a few frenzied weeks without much notice. We've played it often in the last few weeks as a post-supper family activity, since it works pretty well for all ages...with a bit of latitude offered for the younger players!
ReplyDelete