It goes over some mostly made up history and covers the rules and why the game is so addictive. Also talks about some games that are similar from different parts of the world like Carrom.
I built myself a bigass hard to store circle after seeing the SUSD review and it's quite popular with the nieces and nephews and their cousins.. and the parents and grandparents around the holidays... and popular with my friends when we're a little tipsy and hanging out.
“Plamigerent” isn’t a word, and I can’t find any English words similar to it. It seems an unlikely typo. I wonder if the author included it to catch LLMs plagiarizing his work.
But yes, super fun. See the youtube video I posted elsewhere in the thread for a pretty great 'review' of this game which dates back to at least 1867.
I've never seen it spelt before.
As a kid, it was said like: Crow-ken-no
https://www.mynslc.com/en/Discover/Whats-the-Occasion/Happy-...
It's a purely tactile experience - the way the disks crack when they hit each other, the bounciness of the pegs, getting that perfect shot between two sets of pegs, swinging used disks around on the ring at the end of the round - it's a very satisfying toy.
You'd be right to think of it as another version of shuffleboard or curling, but the game can live on a small table and you can crank away games from the comfort of a chair with a beer.
One could imagine a (dystopian?) world where everybody speaks they own highly individualized, maybe even copyrighted language, and where interpersonal communications happen via AI translators.
Really shows how much has gone into a silly flicking game you play at the pub.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/crokicurl-curling-cr...
For example: https://hub.shapertools.com/creators/5cfea3909fc9260017675dc...
Amazing feat of repeatability, but also nerve control. One mistake and you are losing it. Even if it looked less fun than later videos.
Highly recommended!
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/521/crokinole
I’d have had a board years ago if not for worrying it’d become another huge rarely-used thing to store or dispose of, after perhaps a year of good fun with it. Still haven’t played.
Made it with the Crisp game library which I highly recommend for quickly making charming little 2D games: https://github.com/abagames/crisp-game-lib
There are some fun trick shots people do online https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PTTeLj-fSQA
And you can manage a couple of the trick shots yourself with a little practice. It's honestly quite lightweight and easy to learn which makes it fun.
It's a great activity to do while you are waiting for some people to show up. As any dexterity game, the issue is playing across skill levels. Going against an experienced player as a newbie means they better take it easy on you, or you are never scoring a point
In Grade 7 it became big in our classroom. We ended up having a weekly tournament. I could never shoot the pieces reliably, so I made a tool out of K-Nex that resembled an elastic-powered pool cue inside a barrel that rested nicely on the board. I even had a slider I could adjust to "remember" the right amount of power for a given shot.
The specific rules that came with the board did not cover this, but after me absolutely crushing the first tournament it was summarily banned. This might be part of my engineer origin story.
Another reason why I will always appreciate HN and its breadth of community and interests.
Reversed to avoid spoiling the game: .gard ot reyalp eht gnicrof yb devlos eb dluoc siht ebyaM .kcab ot kcab tsrub eht reggirt ylbailer ot mhtyhr a ni taht od ot eunitnoc tsuj nac uoy ,kcilc ot ecalp thgir eht dnif uoy fI
Two-player games tend to suffer in the rankings to begin with, for that reason, though some do OK. Two player games with long or highly variable play times tend to suffer even more. Two player games that a brand new player is unlikely to enjoy playing against someone with even moderate skill is an even bigger handicap.
There’s also, undeniably, some novelty factor, especially near the top of the lists—which is part of why crokinole’s ranking is so remarkable.
Approximately nobody is breaking out chess or go at a board game night, even as a sidebar game for two players while they wait for others to finish a larger game. Maybe speed chess, I suppose. But in general those are less “we’re having a game night” and more “we’re having a chess/go/backgammon night” sort of games. Like, if someone’s not into chess and you suggest a chess match to kill some time waiting for the rest of the group to show up, they’re probably going to be less-happy than if you pulled out any of dozens of lightweight, quick 2-player games with fairly good BGG ratings. By that metric of game night suitability, chess and go et c. aren’t top-100 material. They’re less board-gamer games and more chess-person or go-person or whatever games.
[1] By this I mean the preferences and interests of the active parts of the community tend to run this way. You see lots of midweight attractive-looking newb-friendly (and also well-designed!) games good for multi-game gatherings, and big baroque “we’re getting together for six hours to play one single match of this game” games near the tops of lists, as a result, as those are the two kinds of game-playing gathering that are the ideal form of board gaming for the crowd there. It’s not a place with an unusual density of chess tournament fans, you know?
Also note that you'd never use actual sand on a crokinole board or tabletop shuffleboard. Sand, wax, or powder is what the shuffleboard products are referred to as and are made of specially formulated silicone beads (much less abrasive than, say, beach sand) or cornmeal, or even sometimes ground walnut shells.
I like carrom a lot, but I'm terrible at it. I'm at least a reasonable player at crokinole, and it's a lot easier to introduce others to the game without them getting too frustrated by it.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/192278/awesome-four-player-...
Most flicking/dexterity games are pretty abstract: lightly themed, if they're themed at all. And a lot of the ones that are themed, somehow don't get it "right". Flickwars is pretty cool in that it's got a light space battle theme with asymmetric team powers. It also has a neoprene board which, while not being as satisfying as polished wood, makes a surprisingly satisfying flicking surface. There's a modular setup to the game, where players place obstacles on or (because of the neoprene surface) UNDER the board. This meshes nicely with the space theme as you can consider these obstacles as gravitational anomalies. All-in-all, it's a pretty lightweight game, but it's a fun diversion from heavier board games.
There's been study over what "biases" the site has, which I personally think is rather uninteresting (what's the use of a global ranking without bias, after all?), but there's a lot more to it than what's easy to learn.
I can play the simulator on mobile but on the desktop Linux the "place disc" button is unresponsive to mouse clicks. I tried both Firefox and Chrome. Am I the only one?
> The following rules are sanctioned by the National Crokinole Association and used in all NCA Tour events.
> (…)
> 7. i) When a player is shooting, at least one portion of his/her posterior must be in contact with the seat of his/her chair.
http://nationalcrokinoleassociation.com/resources/rules.html
Further, you see a lot of "This game has seen tons of play at our table! Maybe 100 times!", not like chess where 100 matches is something someone who's barely even interested in chess may achieve by accident (I bet I've played 200+ matches in my life, and I'm not really that into chess, don't find it as fun as probably most other board games I've played, and remain entirely terrible at it—and I mean it, even chess programs set to stupid-mode so they only look one move ahead get me about half the time, because I reliably blunder badly at least once per match and they catch it every single time). It's just a very different crowd than the dive-very-deep-into-one-game sorts that might rate whichever game they've chosen to do that with as #1 and aren't even really looking around for other games.
There are exceptions in the rankings, that's not absolute, but mid-weight game night games that play something in the 4-8 range, good lighter filler games for game night, and enormous this-is-your-whole-day games, tend to be the ones that do well, assuming they're also, like, actually good for what they are. That's why super-famous games like chess aren't higher than they are (if chess were just invented today I bet it'd struggle to break the top 5,000—"Two stars, some of the variant rules are OK but ultimately if you want an abstract two-player game on a grid, you're better off with GIPF, and the knife-fight tension and wonderful portability of something like Hive just isn't present here, if you want a game with theme but don't really care about it connecting well with play—which this game clearly doesn't—just get Hive. Also they should print the piece layout and move sets on the board, it's hard to remember all that stuff and it's not like that space is used for attractive artwork or anything mechanically-relevant except the grid anyway.")
BGG rankings tend to be pretty good. I find they rate co-op games, sequels, kickstarted games and very heavy games a bit too highly. But apart from that they're good.
I don't know why you would expect Backgammon in particular to be highly ranked. It's got more strategy than most highly random games (e.g. cribbage) but it's not fun, at least not compared to the many many better board games that exist now.
The real game is less deterministic purely by having to contend with messy real world physics. If you want to make the game a little more engaging, I'd recommend trying to figure out a way to mix up where you have to fire the shots from, etc, add blockers to get in the way to shuffle the timing, etc.
All the more reason Crokinole—a far less well-known classic game than backgammon or chess or go—ranking so highly is remarkable.
>plamigerent adjective /ˌplæmɪˈdʒɛrənt/
Etymology: Derived from the prefix "pla-", suggesting play or game, and "migerent," possibly from the Latin "migrans," meaning moving or changing, combined with a connotation of belligerence.
Definition: Describing a setting or atmosphere characterized by competitive tension, where the dynamics of skill are heavily influenced by aggressive or disruptive play. Often contrasts with more relaxed environments where players can fully showcase their abilities.
The reason being is that complex games are played by fewer people and those who do master it are more likely to give high ratings. Whereas, a less complex game gets played more and is subjected to harsher ratings.
Somebody made a great data analysis of reranking BGG ratings by complexity for the real top games list: https://dvatvani.com/blog/bgg-analysis-part-2
One side has a flat surface for carrom and the other side has the layout for crokinole.
It's a good coinage. I took it to mean something along the lines of competitively pressured in a structured combative manner and it does kind of sound like it could mean that. Which I guess it now does.
I.e. if you say "thank God", you're really saying you're thankful that you and the people around you are making decisions that benefit everyone.
(Not an invitation for theistic discussion, just trying to be helpful to a fellow atheist)