Skittles -- the game, not the candy.
Jun. 26th, 2006 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasSo, in the gift shop of the Yale Museum of British Arts, our visit to which I have still not blogged, I bought, among a whole lot of other things, a small tabletop skittles game.
"Skittles" is a term for the entire family of bowling games. If it involves throwing a ball at pins in order to knock them over, it's in the skittles family. Um, except cricket. But, yeah.
One of the more basic skittles games is "ninepin." You set nine pins up in a three-by-three square, with a corner facing you, and you get three balls to throw at the pins, and try to knock them over. You get a point per pin, and if you manage to knock them all over, you reset the pins, meaning that you could theoretically get 27 points in a frame. Not like that ever happens that you get a strike that good. Of course, you sometimes can knock over all nine pins with two balls, and have a spare ball left over to knock over some extra ones. (See where the terms come from in tenpin?)
Size, shape, and spacing of the pins, size and material of the balls, distance from bowler to pins, length, width, material of the bowling surface -- those can all change.
For variants on the game, you can set the nine pins up in a lozenge/rhombus shape, either with the wide side or narrow side facing you.
Or you could use ten pins instead of nine, and set them up in a triangle -- a row of four pins, with a row of three pins in front of it, with a row of two pins in front of that, with one pin in front of that.
So you can see, if you standardize your skittles on one size and shape of pin, one length and width and material of alley, one range of weights, sizes, and materials of balls, you've got American ten-pin bowling. Well, except that, with thick enough and close-set enough pins, a wide enough ball, and the ten-pin triangle rather than the nine-pin square or lozenge, you can generally hit enough pins to make the game work better with TWO balls per frame rather than three.
As I have discovered, bowling is a lot of fun.
And, it turns out, that's because ALL skittles-type games are fun.
Naturally, if you've got something fun, the first thing you're going to want to do with it is miniaturize it.
Because, well. . .
Okay, everybody knows that bowling and beer go together amazingly well. And that's true of ALL skittles games, which is why we have the phrase "beer and skittles", as in "life's not just skittles and beer", meaning that there's more to life than drinking and bowling.
Mind you, I'm not convinced that there IS more to life than drinking and bowling, but that's what the saying says.
Well, I guess there's also the web, fishing, reading, music, and porn. I don't fish, but it seems like it would be fun.
Okay. So . . . "skittles and beer", "drinking and bowling." How do you bring these things together? Step one is to serve beer at bowling alleys. And that is how the problem is solved in the United States, and it's a perfectly fine solution.
But the British solution is to go the other way, and have bowling in pubs. This is also an elegant solution, but it has its own difficulties. Primarily, the danger posed by hurling bowling balls, even little ones, inside, around glassware.
Clearly, miniaturization is the answer.
One common tabletop skittles game looks like this:
You actually SWING the ball at the pins, rather than ROLLING it, and you have to get around the pole. . . I've never played it, and have only seen the picture, but it looks like fun, doesn't it?
So that's a VERY elegant solution.
That's not the solution I used, though. I used the less-elegant solution.
I cleared off the kitchen table, put books around the edges of the table to keep things from going all over the floor, and got a bunch of little dowels that I'd bought to attempt to fix one of our doors with -- it's a long story, but there's a reason that a bunch of little dowels would have fixed the door, except they actually just split the doorframe, and I have no idea where I'm going next with the whole "attempting to fix the bedroom door" saga, but the point is that we have a bag of 1 1/2 " by 3/8" fluted birch dowel pins, and a bag of 1 1/2" by 5/16" fluted birch dowel pins. (Approximately 3.8 cm by 0.95 cm, and 3.8 cm by 0.8 cm).
And I've got marbles. Both the "target marble" size and the "shooter marble" size.
Using the larger pins and the larger marble gives a game that feels a lot like standard ten-pin bowling. Using the target marbles and the narrower pins, the game feels like candlepins. And I've also been setting the game up as ninepins, too.
So, this is what I've been doing to goof off the last couple days, instead of computer games as my goof-off activity. It's fun! If you've got random dowels and marbles lying around, you should try it, too!
"Skittles" is a term for the entire family of bowling games. If it involves throwing a ball at pins in order to knock them over, it's in the skittles family. Um, except cricket. But, yeah.
One of the more basic skittles games is "ninepin." You set nine pins up in a three-by-three square, with a corner facing you, and you get three balls to throw at the pins, and try to knock them over. You get a point per pin, and if you manage to knock them all over, you reset the pins, meaning that you could theoretically get 27 points in a frame. Not like that ever happens that you get a strike that good. Of course, you sometimes can knock over all nine pins with two balls, and have a spare ball left over to knock over some extra ones. (See where the terms come from in tenpin?)
Size, shape, and spacing of the pins, size and material of the balls, distance from bowler to pins, length, width, material of the bowling surface -- those can all change.
For variants on the game, you can set the nine pins up in a lozenge/rhombus shape, either with the wide side or narrow side facing you.
Or you could use ten pins instead of nine, and set them up in a triangle -- a row of four pins, with a row of three pins in front of it, with a row of two pins in front of that, with one pin in front of that.
So you can see, if you standardize your skittles on one size and shape of pin, one length and width and material of alley, one range of weights, sizes, and materials of balls, you've got American ten-pin bowling. Well, except that, with thick enough and close-set enough pins, a wide enough ball, and the ten-pin triangle rather than the nine-pin square or lozenge, you can generally hit enough pins to make the game work better with TWO balls per frame rather than three.
As I have discovered, bowling is a lot of fun.
And, it turns out, that's because ALL skittles-type games are fun.
Naturally, if you've got something fun, the first thing you're going to want to do with it is miniaturize it.
Because, well. . .
Okay, everybody knows that bowling and beer go together amazingly well. And that's true of ALL skittles games, which is why we have the phrase "beer and skittles", as in "life's not just skittles and beer", meaning that there's more to life than drinking and bowling.
Mind you, I'm not convinced that there IS more to life than drinking and bowling, but that's what the saying says.
Well, I guess there's also the web, fishing, reading, music, and porn. I don't fish, but it seems like it would be fun.
Okay. So . . . "skittles and beer", "drinking and bowling." How do you bring these things together? Step one is to serve beer at bowling alleys. And that is how the problem is solved in the United States, and it's a perfectly fine solution.
But the British solution is to go the other way, and have bowling in pubs. This is also an elegant solution, but it has its own difficulties. Primarily, the danger posed by hurling bowling balls, even little ones, inside, around glassware.
Clearly, miniaturization is the answer.
One common tabletop skittles game looks like this:
You actually SWING the ball at the pins, rather than ROLLING it, and you have to get around the pole. . . I've never played it, and have only seen the picture, but it looks like fun, doesn't it?
So that's a VERY elegant solution.
That's not the solution I used, though. I used the less-elegant solution.
I cleared off the kitchen table, put books around the edges of the table to keep things from going all over the floor, and got a bunch of little dowels that I'd bought to attempt to fix one of our doors with -- it's a long story, but there's a reason that a bunch of little dowels would have fixed the door, except they actually just split the doorframe, and I have no idea where I'm going next with the whole "attempting to fix the bedroom door" saga, but the point is that we have a bag of 1 1/2 " by 3/8" fluted birch dowel pins, and a bag of 1 1/2" by 5/16" fluted birch dowel pins. (Approximately 3.8 cm by 0.95 cm, and 3.8 cm by 0.8 cm).
And I've got marbles. Both the "target marble" size and the "shooter marble" size.
Using the larger pins and the larger marble gives a game that feels a lot like standard ten-pin bowling. Using the target marbles and the narrower pins, the game feels like candlepins. And I've also been setting the game up as ninepins, too.
So, this is what I've been doing to goof off the last couple days, instead of computer games as my goof-off activity. It's fun! If you've got random dowels and marbles lying around, you should try it, too!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 06:27 am (UTC)"I do not believe such a beer exists, Homer"
"Well, then just give me some skittles and a six-pack"
(quoting from memory, sorry if I get it wrong)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 11:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 06:59 pm (UTC)There's beer, skittles, and tending bar.
Kiralee
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 07:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-27 07:21 pm (UTC)Kiralee
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-28 12:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-28 01:32 pm (UTC)Kiralee