Crokinole exploded in the board game community a few years ago. I got a lovely hand made board from Canada.
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-cheek rule:
> 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
I first played Crokinole when I was 9 years old at my grandmother's house with my cousins and was immediately hooked. That same day I remember telling my sister that it was a time machine - we started playing it at noon, and an hour later it was suddenly 6pm.
This game has such a special place in my heart - like others, I have some beautiful handmade boards, some of which have been in my family for a couple generations. Canadian as well which seems thematically common here. My father and I spend as much time trash-talking each other about playing as we do playing. And my grandmother was a complete shark, the crokinole matriarch who would put any of us to shame.
Another reason why I will always appreciate HN and its breadth of community and interests.
Friend once lamented annoying part of a breakup was losing holiday crokinole priveleges at their ex's family cottage. I loled, but it was really stupid satisfying flicking on a high end board.
I've always known this game as Knipsbrät, but that's the German mennonite name. I guess there aren't a lot of us. We also immigrated to Canada. I don't know if our family picked up the game before or after the move, but it's been a staple of our games nights since before I was born (36 now.. I think)
It reminded me of Carrom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrom which is a similar Indian game I've recently discovered via Instagram feed due to following trick shots.
I grew up where it was invented, but I first learned of crokinole in the memorable lyrics of Moxy Fruvous, in which they manage to rhyme it with "princess of Monaco". Recommended, especially if you're from Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3JfiexLVA
Check out the Shut Up and Sit Down review of crokinole: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XMKzeg78peg&t=580s&pp=ygUJY3Jv...
I live in France and had never heard about this game before.
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?
> In non-competitive, less plamigerent settings, their skills really shine
“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.
When I was a kid my neighbors (who were from Ontario) taught me this game - we played all the time! It’s been over 20 years since and every few I try and recall what “that game” was. So glad to have seen this!
For interested woodworkers, here's a nice post-mortem of someone's attempt at making a Crokinole board: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/731671/postmortem-on-the-hi... (Complete with creating a set of jigs from scratch)
Really shows how much has gone into a silly flicking game you play at the pub.
Crokinole is so much fun. I wish boards were not so expensive and difficult to keep nice or I think it would be much much more popular. It inspired me to try a whole slew of other tactile/physical "board" games.
My grandparents had a crokinole board! I'd say it's definitely a known game among older generations around southern ontario, but much less common with younger folk. It's really fun though, and families that do play it can get really competitive about it.
Every wood-paneled Canadian rec room in the 1970s had a crokinole game set up right beside the rod hockey table and maybe the stacks of empty two-four cases. Just thinking about it brings back the smell memory of stale beer and cigarettes mingled with mould from the damp shag carpeting.
Played in basement at grandmas house as a kid, in Southerner Ontario.
I've never seen it spelt before.
As a kid, it was said like: Crow-ken-no
It’s popular in Atlantic Canada too, especially when the weather prohibits washer toss!
https://www.mynslc.com/en/Discover/Whats-the-Occasion/Happy-...
I watched it two or three times before I understood I was watching a 30 second loop, only because I was getting impatient and showed all controls in the browser.
Amazing feat of repeatability, but also nerve control. One mistake and you are losing it. Even if it looked less fun than later videos.
Love the quiet athleticism on display in the video. This sport makes cup-stacking look like pickleball.
This seems like a great social game. I like how it's very tactile yet looks like it could be taught, or learned, in a few short minutes.
They've had this at PAX (East & West) the past years, it's been a ton of fun playing it and getting better.
Got a board a year ago and love it, a friend tried it once and bought a board too. I'm tempted to get one delivered to my parents and in-laws, so we can all play when I go out to visit. It's so simple to teach, and yet there's a ton of room for improving simply by playing. Any time we have people over, the board eventually comes down off the wall, and the first-timers get a quick lesson.
Crokinole is an amazing boardgame. It is deservedly in the top 50 on BGG. I'm an amateur woodworker and built my own board. We will happily spend hours playing it.
Like poutine, probably coming to a bar or pub near you.
Almost twenty years ago, I brought a crokinole board into my work and it became a very popular diversion. We came up with a cutthroat version where four players could play individually rather than the more traditional 2v2 four-player variant.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/192278/awesome-four-player-...
TIL about this game! But gotta say that I loved the article's interactivity and graphs :) Really cool!
so cool to see this on here, I'm from rural southern Ontario and I feel like I always have to explain it to anyone from the city or 'not from these parts'
I played this game as a kid at the local grange hall. I don’t recall how it came to be a part of the local scene back then, but I’ve recalled it fondly over the years.
A matchup not unlike ... Swift vs. Eilish
What does that even mean.
I've lived my entire life not knowing there was an "L" in the name or even having an approximation of the spelling. I've played it and talked about it, but only vocally, and nobody's enunciated the "ole", so I've always thought it ended with an "oh" sound.
For those frustrated with the game not working, it looks like that the canvas rendering the disc can block the "Place disc" button, depending on your initial window size. To fix this, use your browser's device simulator (Ctrl+Shift+I -> Ctrl+Shift+M on Chrome, Ctrl+Shift+M on Firefox) to narrow the window's width, then refresh the page.
I would love to know why this is so satisfying to watch.. I can't imagine to play but wow.
If you do play crokinol and have never used Gliss powder I suggest you try it, though it is a bit messy
Ha from the video I was wondering what the point of the board being round was. But the examples that follow which show pegs that didn't go through the hole made it clear.
Looks fun! Any recommendations on buying a board to start with for less than $100 or so? Might just get a cheapo one on amazon to try out.
Shut Up and Sit Down, popular quirky boardgame review site/channel, did a review of the game, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMKzeg78peg
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.
Crokinole looks fun, but personally I'm into BulletBall and BulletBall Extreme (which may one day be an Olympic sport).
Is what?
This seems like a fun game. One that I enjoy playing is Carrom which a friend taught me. It's a similar game, except the pockets are in the four corners of a square board and then it's like pool.
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.
At my first job we had a very senior canadian on my team. He introduced Crokinole to the workplace and it never left. A lot of fun and honestly the perfect “office 15 minute break” game. Though inevitably there were a lot of “Come on, best 2 out of 3.”
And now you need to know about Crokicurl, a mash-up of Crokinole and curling!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/crokicurl-curling-cr...
growing up we loved Carrom, a 4p game of similar style probably.
Had no idea Crokinole was a local thing.
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.
Growing up we called it Carrom board, which is square board with 4 pockets in the corners. I never knew there was an American version of it as Crokinole board.
Is this an air table?
Weird that this article doesn't mention Carrom at all - maybe people in North America haven't heard of it.
Looks like carrom but easier.
Carrom is so much better
pool for children?
feels like I could crush it in this game, i grew up playing lots of canicas as a kid in Bolivia :)
I love IRL Crokinole so much that I made a single-player tower-defense-ish version of it for the browser: https://games.charlietran.com/crokunolu/
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