What is Crokinole? An explainer (forced upon me by Jess)
Hi. I’m Ferg. Jess promised in her origin post that she’d force me to write about Crokinole, and apparently that wasn’t an idle threat. So here we are.
Crokinole is the best board game most people have never heard of. If you’ve heard of it, you probably learned it from a Mennonite uncle, a Canadian, or a single oddly-specific YouTube video. It’s a flicking game played on a round wooden board with discs about the size of a 50p coin. You flick your disc with a finger, try to land it in valuable scoring rings, and ideally knock your opponent’s discs off the board entirely. That’s it. That’s the game.
The board
A real Crokinole board is about 26 inches across, which sounds normal until you have to store one. It’s heavy. Mine lives under the sofa and we’ve all stubbed a toe on it at least once.
The playing surface has four concentric scoring rings:
- 5 ring — the outermost band. The cheap seats.
- 10 ring — middle band.
- 15 ring — inner band, just outside the pegs.
- 20 hole — a small recessed cup in the dead centre. Get a disc in here and it’s a guaranteed 20.
Around the 15 ring there are eight little pegs, evenly spaced. These are the entire game.
Why the pegs are everything
Without the pegs, Crokinole would be a target-shooting exercise. You’d aim at the centre, every time. With the pegs, the centre is guarded — a direct shot at the 20 hole gets blocked by a peg about two-thirds of the time. Suddenly you have to thread a gap, or carom off a peg, or shoot indirectly. Every shot becomes a geometry puzzle.
The pegs are why people who’ve played 500 games can still surprise themselves. The angles never stop being interesting.
How a round works
Two players sit opposite each other (or two teams of two). Each player has eight discs. You take turns flicking one disc at a time toward the centre. There’s one important rule:
The open shot rule. If your opponent has any disc on the board, your shot must hit one of theirs. Miss, and your disc gets removed.
This rule is what makes Crokinole tactical instead of just lucky. You can’t just sit and farm 20s. If your opponent puts a disc anywhere on the playing surface, you have to deal with it before you can score.
At the end of the round (all 16 discs played), the player with the higher disc value on the board takes the difference as their score. If you scored 60 and your opponent scored 35, you win the round by 25 points.
Why we picked it
Three reasons, mostly:
- It’s in the public domain. No one owns Crokinole, which means we can riff on it without asking anyone’s permission.
- The core loop is satisfying in a way that doesn’t need explaining. Flick disc. Disc hits other disc. Numbers happen. That’s a complete dopamine cycle in about three seconds.
- It’s never been done well in browser. There are a few apps. They’re fine. None of them feel like the real thing. We thought we could do better.
If you want to play the real version, find one. They’re expensive, but every Crokinole board outlives every iPhone you’ll ever own. If you just want to flick some pixel discs around a round table, we’re working on that too.
— Ferg
Next time from me: how the board actually works in pixel form, and what we got wrong on the first three prototypes.