Whilst in our local last Friday, we got to talking about pub games and the more we talked, the more games we realised we knew. There are so many pub games across this diminutive island of ours, all different shapes and sizes and often with dedicated league players and supporters. For example, Steph’s from Bedfordshire where there’s a big Hood-Skittles movement. It’s a game that’s like nine-pin bowling and is raised onto a table with a net at the back and you throw ‘cheeses’ at the pins ‘til they’re all knocked down. This game is derived from the pub games Alley Skittles or Nine Pins but is a miniaturised version to fit into the light-starved nooks and crannies of our institutional boozers.

Harry remembers playing Bar Billiards as a kid, which is a table without side and corner pockets, but with 9 holes in the playing surface which are assigned certain point values (from 10 to 200). The World Billiard Championships are held every year in Jersey. It’s a popular game in southern England and the Channel Islands, don’t you know. It has been suggested that this game is a version of Bagatelle – the object of which is to get a number of balls (set at nine in the nineteenth century) past pins (which act as obstacles) into holes. In 1777 a party was thrown in honour of Louis XVI and the Queen at the Chateau de Bagatelle. Bagatelle from Italian, bagattella, signifies a trifle, a decorative thing. The highlight of the party was a new table game featuring the slender table and cue sticks, which players used to shoot ivory balls up an inclined playfield. The table game was dubbed “Bagatelle” by the Count and shortly after swept through France and later to the UK in about 1819 (says the OED).

Did you know that patents for Table Football exist from as far back as the 1890s? It’s true! The history of Table Football began when Alejandro Finisterre thought of making a form of soccer that would be fun for children who could not play actual soccer. So he commissioned Francisco Javier Altuna to build it for him, thus the first foosball table. Aaahh, that’s nice!

What are your favourite pub games (apart from the see-how-many-pints-I-can-sink-before-closing-time variety)? Tell us here: www.thelaundry.biz/blog

Love from Harry, Rachel, and Steph

Trackback URL