The Four Greatest Lawn Games You’ve Never Heard Of
Forget badminton and bocce ball.
Games like Giant Kick Croquet, Ladder Golf, Rollors and Scatter let you get
competitive on your acres of Kentucky bluegrass—or patch of AstroTurf
By Keith Blanchard in the Wall Street Journal
THERE ARE TWO distinct origins of the modern lawn: The close-kept grass
around medieval castles—trimmed so sentinels had an unobstructed view of
approaching hostiles—and the village “commons,” owned by all and mowed by
sheep. Today’s lawn games preserve the best of both: the sociability of the
town get-together, and the thrill of combat.
What’s not to love about lawn games?
The equipment is colorful, simple and oversize. The games are competitive but
not really, and bragging rights last only until sunset. You can play them
barefoot, wearing sunglasses and holding a sangria in your idle hand.
Here, some of today’s cutting-edge
lawn games—organized by their ancestral lines—tested for simplicity,
playability and sheer fun.
Tricky
Wickets
Spiritual ancestor: Croquet
French peasants were using mallets
to knock balls through willow-reed hoops as far back as the 1300s, in a
precursor to croquet called paille maille (loosely, “hammer ball”).
In Britain, where paille maille
was Anglicized to “pall mall,” the outdoor game enjoyed a vogue during the
swinging 1600s. It was played on a golf-size course of long alleys. After 200
years off, the game was reintroduced by Ireland to England as “crookey,” around
1850. It made its debut in the 1900 Olympics, but only one spectator purchased
a ticket. As an amateur pursuit in British and U.S. backyards, however, it
flourished.
Modern descendant: Giant Kick Croquet
Giganticizing is important to the
lawn-game spectacle. (Today you can buy lawn Yahtzee with giant dice, oversize
Jenga, etc.) Kick Croquet replaces the standard grapefruit-size balls with
14-inch silky, kickable lawn balloons and ditches the mallets altogether.
You’ll want to play on a pretty flat surface, on a wind-free day, or the ball
will not obey the flight plan in your head. The set comes with just two balls,
and nine wickets, so buy two sets if you plan on competing with more than two
players. It’s fun trying to kick for accuracy, and even more fun to watch, but I
found myself missing the solid ball-on-ball knock, the glee of whacking my
opponent’s hopes and dreams into the neighbor’s yard. Giant Kick Croquet Set, $26,
esportsonline.com
Provocative
Pins
Spiritual ancestor: Lawn Bowling
People have been rolling things at
targets on lawns for eons: A stone bowling set was found intact in an ancient
Egyptian tomb. Modern bowling, using wooden “pins,” can be traced to a German
religious ceremony from the third and fourth centuries A.D., where sinners
rolled stones at a “kegel” (a wooden club). Knocking it over cleansed you of
your transgressions, and the game ultimately became as popular as sin itself.
Dutch explorers sailing with Henry
Hudson may have brought the first lawn-bowling set to the Americas. Bowling
eventually moved indoors, of course, where lanes could be made perfectly flat
and garish shoes could be rented at profit.
Modern descendant: Scatter
This is a Finnish game of recent
invention (1996). Players take turns tossing a heavy wooden dowel (like a
relay-race baton) at a cluster of 6-inch wooden “skittles” placed in a tight
formation, with the high-value 10-, 11- and 12-point skittles in the center.
Knock over one, and you score the skittle’s point value; knock over two or
more, and you score only the number of skittles you dropped—e.g., four points
for four skittles. You will miss dearly the magic of automatic pinsetters, but
there’s real strategy here in attacking the exactly-50-point end goal with your
blunt instrument; it’s a bit like trying to do surgery with a hambone. A great
game for limited space, as you only need a 12-by-4-foot yardlet to play.
Scatter, $50, yardgames.us
Competitive
Closeness
Spiritual ancestor: Horseshoes
The practice of tossing horseshoes
without a horse attached seems to have emerged from the Roman Empire, when
soldiers bent used horseshoes into rings for flinging. Like the discus, these
were originally thrown for distance, but eventually someone pounded a stake
into the ground and made accuracy the goal. As a bonus, it was no longer
necessary to bend the shoes—just cry havoc, and let slip that spinning steel.
Dangerous flying hardware brings us
to lawn games’ darkest hour: lawn darts. We tried to defang the dart by making
it comically oversize and dull, but physics is a cruel master. A giant dart
thrown high enough in the air can gain enough momentum, concentrated on the
tiny area of that dull point, to pierce a human skull. Before they were
outlawed in the U.S., in 1988, lawn darts sent more than 6,000 people to the
emergency room, and killed at least three.
Modern descendant: Rollors
Rollors does away with all that
dangerous projectile-heaving. A set of six wooden discs—imagine drink coasters
as thick as a steak—are rolled toward a 7-inch-tall wooden pyramid, slanted to
accept leans. Two teams, alternating, each roll three disks at their opponents’
goal, with points awarded only to the team that’s closest, as in horseshoes;
first to 21 wins. It will remind you of penny-pitching, but there’s an element
of chance: Each rolling disc has different scores on either side, so whether it
lands heads or tails matters. What it loses in danger cred, Rollors gains in
versatility. It’s playable on beach or driveway or muddy junkyard; no spikes to
bury, no sand pits to dig, no helmets required. Rollors, $50, rollors.com
Fore
Play
Spiritual ancestor: Golf
Scotland’s first reference to the
game dates from around 1450, and by the mid-16th century the Scots were already
completely insufferable about it.
But golf is a little too
professional, expensive and equipment-intensive for America’s purposes; it had
to become Frisbee golf. Many lawn pastimes bifurcated thusly, with amateurs
developing a campy shadow version of the “real” sport. Thus baseball begot
Wiffle ball; tennis begot badminton; football begot foosball. When Frisbee golf
started putting on airs and became Ultimate Frisbee, it left golf without a
lawn-party counterpart. Until…
Modern descendant: Ladder Golf
Let’s address the elephant in the
room: Ladder golf bears as much resemblance to golf as a catfish does to a cat.
You try to score high, instead of low; it’s played vertically instead of
horizontally, on a tiny patch of lawn instead of lush acres. The only thing
ladder golf borrows from golf, really, are the actual balls: two of them, yoked
together with nylon rope into not-very-deadly suburban bolas. Each player
tosses three of these at an opponent’s ladder five paces away. It’s available
in various plastic-pipe versions, but consider springing for the solid hardwood
version, featuring brass hardware. Single Ladder Ball Game, $60, laddergolf.com
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