Comment by legitster
12 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
They're not ranking games on whether you've heard of them, but on how fun the BGG community finds them to play. Monopoly is rated #27,258.
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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.
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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