I’m always looking for new fun things to do. Living in Toledo, OH it feels like I’ve done everything around here no less then a hundred times. There is only so much entertainment that northwest Ohio can offer, and as a result you find yourself looking at nearby cities when you get the itch to get out of town. But how many times can you go to Cleveland or Columbus before it starts getting boring too? Detroit is close by but unless there is a band in town you want to see, Detroit doesn’t offer much either. Back in the day my friends and I would do a road trip up to Detroit and Windsor, Ontario to hit record shops. But the internet has made finding those elusive rare imports a lot easier. Doing other nerdy things like attending anime conventions is also a lot of fun, but those don’t happen every day. So in my search for new fun and interesting things to do I found myself in Tavistock, Ontario, Canada earlier this month for the World Crokinole Championship.
Crokinole is a game that my friend Mark turned me on to a couple years ago. Never heard of crokinole? Neither had I until Mark brought it over one night and taught us how to play over a couple beers. Crokinole is a Canadian board game which is sort of like a cross between shuffleboard and pool using small wooden discs. You play on a round wooden board with 3 different point quadrants for 5, 10, or 15 points. In the center of the board is a small hole that is worth 20, but it’s hard to get to as the 15 quadrant is surrounded by small bumpers. Crokinole is played by flicking these discs across the board with your finger. You shoot the discs from the edge of the board in an attempt to make 20 points, or if there are discs of your opponent on the board you need to try to hit theirs off first. While this doesn’t sound very exciting it’s a incredibly fun game, and like a lot of other simple games there is a lot of depth and strategy to it.
Mark’s family has been playing crokinole for years since they lived in Canada when he was younger while his father finished up his grad studies in Saskatchewan. It was a instant hit with us and I tried my darnedest to try to find a copy of the game. However that was harder then it seemed as no one in the US carried crokinole boards, and shipping on these large boards from Canada was pretty expensive. We only live an hour from the Canadian border so I figured that one day we’d find one by making a pit stop in Windsor while in Detroit. But one day I was searching online and found out that Amazon of all places carried the game. So naturally I went ahead and ordered one.
When I get into something new besides wanting to do it all the time, I tend to Google the shit out of whatever subject that might be. As you can imagine there isn’t a ton of information out there on Crokinole, so eventually I discovered that someone made a documentary about the game. This documentary covered the before mentioned World Crokinole Championship in Tavistock, Ontario. As it turned out the earliest known existing crokinole board came from this town, so the tournament was born. You see even though here in the States we’ve never heard of crokinole, it’s played regularly in Canada in social clubs and leagues. Especially in Ontario where the game has it’s roots in rural Mennonite society.
When I was playing around with Google Earth one afternoon (which is one of the greatest time wasters of the modern age) I discovered that Tavistock was only a four hour drive away. This planted the idea of going up to Canada to participate in the tournament. Diana thought it was a great idea, and didn’t take much convincing to get Mark and his wife Rocky on board. So we registered and started practicing for the tournament.
To Be Continued…
