I played Crokinole this weekend for the first time. I saw it up at BGG.Con in November, and saw some talk about it before that (someone made two custom boards for the convention), but didn’t get around to playing it. Greg has his hanging on his wall like the art piece it is, but we’d never played it.

Apparently there are some particular rules about sitting down (one cheek to the seat) and not moving your chair, so the setup at a barstool-height table without chairs was an “invalid” one at the convention, anyway.

It was lots of fun, and a little bit infectious, and made us play until 2:30am, by which time we were not playing too well.

Basic rules: 4-player, each player has 6 disks, rotate in order, team mates across from each other. You must contact an opposing piece, or all of your pieces that moved are removed from the board. Rings are successively worth 5, 10, 15, with the hole in the middle worth 20, and instantly scored. After all are shot, the team in the lead gets the point difference.

The new boards run in the $150-$700 range, but are super nice and basically family heirlooms (barring fire or Katrina event). Of unknown origin but dating back to 1876 at least and popular with Canadian Mennonites. Check out the 35 new models and 3,500 antique used boards.