Very fun. Unfortunately there is a way to, in my opinion, cheese it. I made it to 2485 on my second attempt.
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
That's great feedback, thank you. I built a rudimentary control scheme on top of the minimal Crisp library and will take a look into doing a little more with it.
Good job. Problem with a game like this is that it's too deterministic, you use the exact amount of impulse to aim the disc at the exact same spot every time. If you have decent handeye coordination it swiftly becomes rather trivial.
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.
This is true, I jammed the game out rather quickly but next thing I’d try is a hold-for-power control scheme (like the interactive demos in the article)
as someone who has made huge mammoth games that I have never finished, this is the most well executed stylistic epic damn thing EVER. From the sounds to the low res, love it.
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.
On the board gaming website, Board Game Geek, It sits in the 47th overall rank by ratings (this is very high, even quite good games are often well south of 1,000 in the overall ranks) and fifth in the family games category.
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.
Eh, chess is ranked #453, go #219 and backgammon #1545. The highest ranking game is "Brass: Birmingham" which I have never heard of - so I don't know what to make of these rankings.
BGG is heavily about[1] the board game night experience. Family, gamer group, newbies with a seasoned board gamer showing them some new games, that kind of thing.
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?
BGG has a lot of problems with its ranking system, but one of those is that it favours complex games.
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.
I would disagree, BGG favors simple games. There is not a single hex and chit game in the top 100. Not a single 18xx game in the top 100, and I think that entire genre could fill up 20 of the top 25 if not penalized for their complexity.
BGG is allergic to any complex games. Your mental model of BGG rankings is incorrect, the number of ratings is more important than the average rating as long as that rating is reasonably high. 10,000 players giving a game and 8 or 9 will rank higher than a game that 200 players gave a 10.
Your link uses the weight score, but the problem is the concept of "weight" is ambiguous and non-normalized. For players that play complex games, a normal hex and chit game or 18xx game would be a weight of 3 or 4, so that's what those games are rated at. For the average BGG user, a game from either of those genres would be a 5 or even past that in their mental model, but they don't play complex games so only mid to mid-high complexity games get rated a 5 weight on BGG. Your third party analysis still falls victim to both this bias and the problem of only looking at popular (which also means non-complex) games
Modern board game design didn't really exist until the 2000s, aside from chess and go and wargames that are too complex for 99% of "hardcore boardgamers" there are almost no games worth mentioning from before this century.
Twilight Struggle, a two player game, was the number 1 game on BGG for years. There are a fair number of two player games currently in the top 100 as well.
I think BGG has a couple biases that work against these classic, well regarded competitive games.
1. These games are so well-played and studied that they are terrible to play against skill-unmatched opponents. Some of the games in the top 100 would suffer the same but for that no one has tried to treat them the same way.
2. Just like with any other hobbyist rating website, there is a bias toward games that will increase board gamer hipster cred. Chess, Backgammon, etc are not worth anything here.
I also think there are plenty of games that are just (to my taste) better than the classics but of course ymmv.
I mean, Brass Birmingham and many other high ranking games would be rather poor choices for pick-up and play game nights with most groups (number 7 is Twilight Imperium, which takes 6 hours on the short end!). Indeed, a lot of them can be played as deeply as Chess or Go.
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.
Yeah, the other category (I mentioned in my footnote-edit) is giant games that you dedicate a large part of a day to. Diplomacy, Twilight Imperium, that stuff. The two ideal gaming-situations for BGG-type gamers are multi-game game nights, and gatherings to play a single round of gigantic games that they can never get their more-normal casual game night enjoyer friends to play with them :-)
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.")
I certainly understand that. But again I don't know what to make of the rankings. Yes, I know this is a niche community and yes I know there are more games than these classics...but comparison on Crokinole being #47 among thousands of games in the community is difficult to interpret for someone who hasn't played hundreds of different board games.
Yeah because most people do not find chess, go or backgammon particularly fun. Sorry to burst your bubble if you thought they were somehow perfect games.
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.
As I mentioned in another comment, I expect most of these classic games would do even worse if they were released today. Struggling to find an audience, ranking down in the lower reaches on BGG. The communities around them and their cultural heritage are what they’re really about, and I doubt that you could bootstrap them back up to their current prominence if they showed up out of nowhere today, based solely on the strength of the games per se. Though, to be fair, the majority of top-100 BGG games will be all but forgotten in 100 years, too.
All the more reason Crokinole—a far less well-known classic game than backgammon or chess or go—ranking so highly is remarkable.
There are people who design new abstract tactical games in the style of chess, go, hex, draughts, etc. as a kind of art form or mental exercise, but almost none of them are developed into commercial products.
If anyone is interested Eddycrest [0] makes beautiful high quality boards also available with custom graphics. They are a very small family business producing great sewing furniture and game boards!
disclaimer: the business is near and dear to my heart as my brother is one of the carpenters/jack of all trades there.
Not so few: It was a big hit in the Gathering of Friends convention almost 20 years ago, and BGG con started commissioning 2 new custom painted boards every year: One to raffle, and one to keep.
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
To expand on this, the circumference is divided into four quadrants, and you must shoot from your own quadrant without rotating the board (although physical abilities considered, many people play with house rules where you can rotate it). Saying your butt has to be on your seat limits how much you're allowed to move yourself around the board.
It's true that even with that rule, you can typically lean to take a shot from both extremes of your quadrant, however those shots are harder to aim because you're not positioned behind the shot.
I get out of my chair frequently. When the pieces immediately in front of you are all owned by your team, you want to shoot from the outer edges to avoid hitting your own pieces.
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.
> To be eligible for membership in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, you must be a citizen of the United States over the age of 21 who believes in God (whatever that means to you).
Here's a helpful atheistic definition of "God" I picked up somewhere: The force that enables good things to happen to groups of people who act upon a belief that they should do good to another.
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)
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.
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 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.
> 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.
"You shall know a word by the company it keeps" and so you've now added to the English language, congrats!
>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.
Any of these words meaning "flame" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/p... + "-gerent" so "flame-making" makes sense in context. Could also be "palma" which is Polish for "stain" (a funny sentence when you consider dropping the uppercase letter). Rare to mix Slavic words with a Latin suffix like that, but just as valid as Greek-Latin words like television, homosexual, and hypoadrenalism.
It’s a nice word. Sounds like plausible English, but unlikely to be mistaken for any real word. The context strongly suggests a meaning, so the text is easily interpretable without looking it up.
Lexical watermarking! If that's the case (and if this idea sticks), I'm wondering how far it could go.
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.
This used to be a thing in dictionaries. My favourite word is "Esquivalience", which was defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary as "The wilful avoidance of ones official responsibilities". Prior to that, the word didn't exist, and it was used to catch people just copying the words from their dictionary. Very similar to paper towns on maps
Ha, came here for the same comment (after stopping by Tracey Boards to order a set for my family first.)
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 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?
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
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!
I, as a fledgling woodworker, was able to make my own board with some guidance from a friend. It's definitely a rewarding and educational project! Plus it makes a nice wall decoration when not in use. I used Purple Heart wood for the edges, which looks gorgeous but was difficult to work with. It took a few days of 3-4 hour blocks, due to a busy schedule, so a more experienced woodworker should be able to do one pretty easily.
Spent hours back in the day getting my ass kicked playing this with my grandfather. It quite often got used as a chance to get some grandfatherly advice. The one lesson he taught me and has stuck with me:
"If you can't win. Make it hard for the other guy to win."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you tried Flickwars? I don't own it, but played a demo version at a board game convention maybe five years back. I still keep wanting to pull the trigger on buying it but I've been trying to reel in my boardgame-purchasing problem a bit.
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.
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)
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.
It is. Every now and then when we have guests at home we bring out the board and it is an immediate success. Age does not seem to matter, I have played with people between 10 to 80 years old everyone gets the mechanics within a few minutes.
Learned about it at PAX East this year. Was the sleeper hit of the event for me and a couple of my friends! It was right there next to Klask, which is another kind of interesting tactile game, though I preferred Crokinole.
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.
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.
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.
I was reminded of carrom too, it's super popular in India. kind of like a cross between crokinole and snooker or pool; you need to get your pieces into pockets using a striker, and avoid getting your opponent's pieces in. physically, one big factor is that you're flicking a heavy striker into a much lighter disc.
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.
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.
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.
$100 is a good budget - you will have a lot of choice.
For around $100 you could get a good quality octagon shaped wooden board with wooden discs and powder. Avoid plastic - it’s a totally different game and I don’t think it’s as much fun. If you go octagon, go 27” - you’ll find a lot of really cheap 21” boards but like plastic, it’s a different game and it’s less fun.
Make sure that the bottom is padded - a lot of two in ones aren’t padded and you will scratch your table badly.
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.
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.
We usually play with 4 players, and each player can shoot from anywhere in their quarter of the board. Being equidistant from the center is an important attribute, among other things.
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.”
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.
Canadian. I haven't played Carrom, but it's my understanding it's Indian in origin and plays a bit more like a billiards variant, even going so far as to use tiny pool cues.
I think there are few different variants of this game. I played the version with the tiny pool cues as a kid, but we called it Couronne. Looking at images online it seems the main difference between Carrom and Couronne is that in Couronne you hit the pieces with a cue and that the pockets are much bigger than in Carrom.
I haven’t played in a while but as long as I remember, there aren’t any pool cues but there are varying (house) rules on how/where the disc can be flicked
Generally, crokinole is a much less punishing game than carrom, if we're talking about Indian carrom boards. American carrom boards, that were really popular in after-school programs when I was growing up, have relatively HUGE pockets than the Indian boards, in addition to being smaller boards. American carrom is like playing 8-ball, Indian carrom is like playing snooker.
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.
Often in tabletop crokinole play, the "sand" isn't even used. Modern boards are often slick enough to get away with playing without it, and if it's a board that you roll out regularly, you may not want the cleanup overhead associated with using shuffleboard "sand."
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.
you don't use those shuffleboard wax beads, you use 'gliss powder' which is often boric acid powder, or like even tinier, microbeads. the stuff the use on those shffleboards you find in pubs is much to corse. https://www.maydaygames.com/products/crokinole-premium-gliss...
Far from it. This is the game that turns your calm book-and-armchair grandpa into a wild competitive lunatic. It turns your sweet auntie into a table-flipping animal. It's up there with Euchre for turning old people into unhinged gamers, and I absolutely love it for that.
I'm particularly impressed by your choice of "up there with Euchre" as a metaphor to explain Crokinole. It's like you wanted to make it relatable for people in a larger geographic region, but only a little larger.
Definitely not just for children! It's a really fun game for everyone, and it's a lot easier to have a crokinole board around the house than a pool table.
After building my own.. not much ;) big enough to be annoying to store (doesn't quite fit under the couch or in many tiny closets. A lot of them have hardware sunk into the bottom/back of the board for wall hanging.
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.
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