Crokinole is one of the great oddities of the board gaming world.
Some would argue that it isn’t even a board game but, hey, there’s a board on a table and pieces are put on that board so it most certainly is. If you remove Crokinole from the designation, you also have to remove other flicking games like PitchCar and Flick Em’ Up and Ice Cool.
The fact is, it is a popular board game, one of the more expensive (for a good quality board), and extremely well respected. Right now, out of the tens of thousands of games on Board Game Geek, Crokinole ranks at number 54, right between Clans of Caledonia and Le Havre.
How to Play
Crokinole is actually quite simple. You play on a round board that has a number of concentric circles which set off the different scoring areas. Around the innermost circle are a series of posts which serve to block some access to that area. At the very center is a recessed area the size of one of your playing pieces.
The game is based completely around flicking your pieces onto the board to attain the highest score in each round. If there are none of your opponents pieces on the board, you have a free shot where you can try to put your disc into the center hole or, at a minimum, within the innermost circle. Anything that doesn’t land in one of those areas is removed from the board.
If there is an opponents piece on the board, you must strike it, either with the newly shot piece or with one of your own existing pieces in a combination shot, for your play to count. If you miss the opponent’s disc, you remove your newly played one from the board. Worse, if you miss the opponent but hit one of your own, both are removed from the board.
That’s it for the physical play of the game. In regular games, each player has twelve discs per round. Once all twelve are flicked on both sides, the round is over and scoring begins.
Each player adds up the number of discs they put into the center of the board, which count twenty points each. The innermost circle counts as 15, the next out 10 and the outside one 5 points. If a piece is on the line, it counts as the lower circle score.
Take the two totals, subtract the lower from the higher and the higher scoring players gets that many points. Standard games go to 100 points.
While the above explains a two player game, Crokinole can also be played with four player broken into two teams. In that case, the twelve discs are divided six to each teammate but all the other rules remain the same.
Strategy
I’m new to the game, so I am no expert on strategies but, in watching “professionals” play, it is very rare for more than one or two discs to be left on the table at the end of a round. These people do not play with shear force, as you might be prone to do when first playing. They are all finesse and angles, much like playing billiards.
I’ve watched championship matches that start out as one player flicking in a 20 followed by the other person doing the same, back and forth until someone finally makes a mistake and leaves one on the board. That is where the fun starts as these people know how to hit and angle the discs so that they knock their opponents piece off the board while making their discs go off at an angle that leaves them in an optimum position (or even drop it in the hole).
For newcomers, you will do well at first to not shoot the disc right across and off the board. When you finally do have pieces on the board, you’ll find those tiny pegs around the inner circle seem to attract your piece like a magnet.
This is where the first bit of finesse comes in. Flicking is the natural way to shoot but you will also find that you finger/fingernail will start to get sore from the action. By checking instructional videos, I found that the best players rarely fire off pieces with a firm flick. They tend to either lay the back of their finger right on the disc or draw it back just a small amount and PUSH the disc onto the board.
The second skill that must be learned is simple aiming. Yes, your fingernail is slightly rounded and, yes, on a good, fast, Crokinole board, just the slightest miss will send your piece off in the wrong direction.
The Importance of a Quality Board
Karen and I went to Toronto on Labor Day weekend to see Elton John’s final tour and, while there, we accidentally bought our first Crokinole board. Well, not entirely accidently, but we kind of spent more than we had planned, but there was a very good reason for it. The place we were at had two boards available, one about $100 more than the other. The difference between them was astounding. On the cheaper board you could feel the wood grain on the surface. It was obvious that the discs were not going to easily slide over these and that could actually change the direction of the piece making aiming particularly difficult. The more expensive board, on the other hand, had an extremely smooth surface along with a slightly higher board which made flicking much easier.
This is one of the things about the game. You MIGHT enjoy it on a cheaper board but you will eventually see that lesser wood and finishes will not give you the true Crokinole experience.
Unfortunately, it is tough to find a quality board in the U.S. Crokinole’s origins come out of Canada and that country is in the forefront of board manufacturing. Amazon does carry a number of different boards but the best of them are imported. Crokinole USA (crokinole.us) carries Tracey Boards out of Canada but at a bit of a premium. Others include Wooden You Know and Mayday Games, which are based in the U.S. and run occasional Kickstarters for new designs.
There’s a world of accessories also available from additional discs in a wide variety of colors to waxes and beads that make the playing surface even more slippery, glass tubes for placing your twenty point scores, carrying cases, brackets for hanging your board on the wall, and much more.
In Conclusion
Crokinole is an amazingly addictive game that can be played by almost any age; however, to become really good, it will take a lot of practice. The game easily falls into the “easy to learn but hard to master” category. The board alone, if kept nice, can become a family heirloom that is handed down from generation to generation but it’s the gameplay where it really shines. There really isn’t anything like an evening of flicking discs with all the associated laughter (and just a few off-color words).
