A Deck Game, Except Indoors

One of the more puzzling gifts I received last Christmas was a black nylon bag about 6 inches in diameter and nearly five feet long. Audrey explained that it was some sort of game not being bid upon at a silent auction she had attended, and which she procured for a very minimal bid but never actually examined. 

I emptied out some of the contents of the bag at that time, decanting two bags of plastic pucks with three metal ball bearings in the base, as well as some pusher sticks. The scale of these helped us to divine that this was not, in fact, a tabletop game as my wife had suspected, but an indoor version of the cruise ship standard of shuffleboard. We elected not to unroll the playing surface due to its enormity, but finally got the opportunity to do so this weekend at our church's annual long weekend at Rundle's Mission at Pigeon Lake.

The upstairs of the lodge has an enormous common room with an obligingly smooth that is...well, let's call it mostly flat. We rolled out the vinyl court to its full length (about 12' perhaps?), assembled the pushers (more formally called cues or tangs), looked up the rules on the interwebs and set about playing.

Unlike tabletop shuffleboard which uses a curling-style bullseye and similar rules to play, regular shuffleboard has players aiming at a triangle, with the smallest scoring area at the tip gaining skillful shooters ten points. This is followed by an 8-point and 7-point band, bisected by a line into two areas.

At the end of the court is a wide band labeled "10 OFF" which, as you probably suspect, subtracts ten points from one's total. This is bracketed by two much narrower 3-point areas, which seem unique to this indoor iteration.

Initial scoring was decidedly difficult as not only did we need to dial in the precise amount of force to avoid stranding our discs (or "biscuits") in the middle or landing them into the dreaded "10 OFF" area at the end, but scoring any points at all requires the disc to be completely within the numbered area and not touching any lines whatsoever! Yes, the only point to bisecting the base of that triangle is to make scoring even more difficult. 

Games are typically played to 75 points, and after a few games, we found this normally attainable in 6-8 rounds. 

The accessibility of the mechanics and the compelling footprint of the set meant it drew quite a bit of attention from the younger visitors to Rundle's who maintained very accurate scoring each round but could not be bothered to maintain them from one round to the next. 

And when our dear friends Shari and Dave motorcycled up to Pigeon Lake from Red Der, we were delighted to get a couple of games in with them before they headed back through the smoky haze. 

All in all, indoor shuffleboard was a major success - it is just unfortunate that at this point, we only know of one venue we can actually play it in!