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Today a friend mentioned playing carom. Now--when I was a child, I was told that carom was another name for what I grew up playing as crokinole. (Pronounced CROAK-ih-nole.) My cousin had it. It consisted of a hexagonal (I think) flat wooden board, with 3 or 4 concentric circles marked off, and there was a slight circular depression at the very center. Spaced around the smallest circle were some short posts. Each of 2 players had thick wooden disks, which you thumped from the edge of the board. The most points were gained when your disk settled into the depression (which is why the posts guarded it), and if you got yours in there you had to just hope that your opponent was unsuccessful at knocking it out. Since the board and "men" already appeared well-used in 1960, that tells me the game was older than that--probably by at least a couple of decades.
My question: has anybody here even heard the word crokinole? I played it in Tennessee, and none of my Louisville friends knew of it.
They also had part of an old card game, and to my frustration the instructions had been lost: Logomachy.
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Dear Jackie I remember a square game board about the size of a card table, with pockets in
each corner, and markings for several games, on both sides of the board. The carom game had
wooden rings big enough to fit over a finger, and carom meant to strike another piece and bounce
off in an advantageous manner, but I cannot remember the rules or scoring.
It also had tddly-winks, things like poker chips that were made to jump by pressing edge of one
lying on the table with another. I can't rember any rules or scoring for that one either. We also
had a double set of Mah-jongg, with hundreds of little bone sticks with dots indicating value. We used
the pieces of bamboo faced with bone with figures carved in them by standing long rows of them on the
carpet (better than dominoes). There was no TV or radio in those days. Parents played bridge, and
poker. How things have changed.
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Never heard of crokinole, Jackie. But from what you say it appears to be quite different from Carom (at least as I know it).
A Carom board is a square, highly polished, wooden board with holes in all four corners that have small collection baskets tagged on underneath. The centre of the board is marked for a solitary red disc and eighteen white and black (nine each) are arranged in an alternating fashion in concentric circles. Either two or four players can play. Each player shoots a disc (called a striker), in turns, at the central arrangement of discs, with the aim of landing them in the corner holes. Whoever gets the maximum number of discs in, wins. Red scores highest, followed by white and then black.
Have you played this?
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Maahey - that is exactly the game I know as carom. When my father's family fled Partition in 1948, they brought an already far-from-new carom board with them, and I grew up being suitably impressed by my father's (to my eyes) dazzling skill at the game. I once googled carom, and found photos of a tournament somewhere in NJ (hi, Juan) - a room full of carom boards and not a single person who wasn't obviously from the subcontinent. This confirmed what my father had told us about the pasion for the game there.
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Crokinole - cool word, Jackie.
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sjm, do you know then, if this game originated in India or is it another remnant of the Raj?
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sjm, do you know then, if this game originated in India or is it another remnant of the Raj?
My guess is the latter - the name is not even remotely Indian.
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Sorry, Toots, I only know Crokinole as the back of the Carrom® board. Mine was square (rounded corners in 1948 but square in the newer/cheaper version), with pockets in the corners and twenty-four black and white rings (twelve each) to be propelled by snapping them with your finger, and a checkerboard in the middle and a backgammon board around the edges (as long as there was space for them anyway). And the Crokinole board on the back, pretty much as you described it. It came with an instrucition book describing about eighty-four different games that could be played.
It's still available with a little searching. I got my "new" one twenty-five years ago and a whole set of rings and stuff fifteen years ago, and my (thirty-year-old) son got his own five years ago, to play with his own children.
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Wofa, I think you're about the only person I'd let call me Toots and not mind it... :-) I am relieved that ONE person has heard of this game. You inspired me to Google again; I'd tried when I was making the post, but googling under Games came up a blank. I just tried the non-specific way, and oh my gosh--paydirt! One place sells crokinole boards for anywhere from $90 to $700 (making me want to call Ben and see if he still has it!) This place said it was Developed in Canada during the mid-1860s . http://www.frontiernet.net/~crokinol/faq.htm says it isn't known just when or where it was invented, but said there is a strong association with Mennonites. (!) Here's something that might interest you German-speakers: The Mennonites have their own cultural name for the game, Knipsbrett (the "K" is pronounced), believed to be a Low German word meaning "snap-board," but unknown in contemporary German.
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maahey: sjm, do you know then, if this game originated in India or is it another remnant of the Raj?
sjm: My guess is the latter - the name is not even remotely Indian.
Here in Indonesia it's known as kerambol. It's not as popular as it used to be, but still well known. I was told at one point that it originated from N. Africa, but I have my doubts about my informant's reliability.
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>Here in Indonesia it's known as kerambol. It's not as popular as it used to be, but still well known.
In the 60s, apparently, there was shop in Hamilton, where my Dad was living at the time, that sold carom boards imported from Indonesia. That was the last time Dad saw any for sale here.
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kerambol
AHD traces the word carom through carambole, the French name for the billiards stroke, to the Spanish (and maybe Portuguese) carambola. For noun definitions it lists only the billiards stroke and a generalized defintion of a collision followed by a rebound.
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Here's a picture of what my cousin's looked like; I was wrong: 8 sides. http://www.frontiernet.net/~crokinol/gallery/ross4.jpgI was also wrong about how you send your disks in: they are filliped.  Here's a link explaining the differences between carom and crokinole (though it doesn't give the origin of carom), with drawings of the 2 boards: http://www.frontiernet.net/~crokinol/primer.htmA quote: Crokinole boards are not carom boards, but some Crokinole boards are Carrom® boards.
Not all carom boards are Carrom® boards, and not all Carrom® boards are carom boards either.
Not all combination game boards are carom/Carrom® boards, but all Carrom® carom boards are combination game boards.
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Interesting. The site you linked to mentions the "true" carom boards with pockets of 1-1.5 inches in diameter and "Westernised" ones with 4-5 inches. I just measured the pockets on my heirloom board, and they are around 2.5 inches. A compromise board, perhaps?
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crokinole (Pronounced CROAK-ih-nole) sounds like a Cockney's grave.
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Well, Alex, tell you what: you buy me one of those $700 boards, we'll play, and I'll let you croak me, how's that? A compromise board, perhaps? Could be, could be. Possibly the maker of your board worked with what he had available? That reminds me of the bride who would cut a few inches off of every roast she was preparing. When her husband asked her why, she said because her mother always fixed them that way. Finally, mom was invited for dinner, saw her dau. do that, and asked why. Dau. replied, "Because you always did". Mom said, "That was only because I had a very small roasting pan!" I did try to look up the history of carom, and kept getting directed to carom billiards sites. 
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>A compromise board, perhaps? Could be, could be. Possibly the maker of your board worked with what he had available?
Actually, I'm rather chuffed that our board isn't one of those wussy Westernised ones with the gaping 4.5 inch jaws. At least our pockets make it more challenging than that.
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Hey Jackie -
I used to play crokinole at a friend's cottage in Huntsville - so frontier game makes sense to me....But I haven't seen or heard of it since.
Crokinole
Hockey
Lacrosse
Basketball
all Canajun, eh?!
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Hockey? I don't think so! It's too obviously related to games like shinty to be a Canuck "invention." Then there's the matter of which sort of hockey came first. The game you call "hockey" is called "ice hockey" here, when we talk about "hockey", we are referring to that which Nth Americans call field hockey. Sorry to be a bully about this.
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Isn't basketball just netball, but you're allowed to run with the ball?
Bingley
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>Isn't basketball just netball, but you're allowed to run with the ball?
Not only that, but the basket is both shorter and wider than the net in netball.
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Sorry to be a bully about this.Tsk! No you're not! Darling honey mine, don't be a bully and a liar, both! 
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My use of the word "bully" was, of course, a hockey reference.
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Isn't basketball just netball, but you're allowed to run with the ball?
so which came first? My dictionary compares the latter to the former, suggesting to me two possibilities:
1. Basketball is more widely known in Canada (this being a Canuck Oxford I'm consulting), so netball is compared to the more familiar thing.
2. Basketball came first.
I haven't googled either game name. Do know basketball was new in the late 1800s, because its newness is featured in one of the Great Brain books which are based on the life of the author (John D. Fitzgerald). But I don't know when netball came about.
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A piece of advice from a longtime crokinoler. If you play, make sure your fingernail is touching the disk before you shoot or it can get painful. The game may be more common in the Maritimes since my forefathers (well actually my foremothers) came from Nova Scotia.
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It's too obviously related to games like shinty to be a Canuck "invention."
'Scuse me, hoser, but just because it's "related" to other games, doesn't make it a different game in its own right - and therefore invented by Canadians. The Scots had ice, didn't they? Did they use it to play ice hockey? Noooo.
Same with netball and basketball. They're different games. Anyone who plays either would tell you so.
Same with rounders and baseball or cricket and baseball. You can point to similarities between many games if you try hard enough.
Canucks invented what we call hockey, which some other parts of the world know as "ice hockey." Chew on that.
What IS a bone of contention, is WHICH Canucks invented it. Disputatious parties from the Maritimes and Ontario are still duking it out over that one.
And sjm, if you expect to be understood, speak some universal language, why doncha. "Bully" to a non-sporting type such as meself just means bully.
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> "Bully" to a non-sporting type such as meself just means bully.
Ah, but in a discussion all about hockey, and its allegedly intrinsic Canadian-ness, it was surely not unreasonable to expect a Canadian to know that the term is used in hockey.
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>cuse me, hoser, but just because it's "related" to other games, doesn't make it a different game in its own right - and therefore invented by Canadians. The Scots had ice, didn't they? Did they use it to play ice hockey? Noooo.
According to the CAHA, British soldiers in Kingston, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, played the first games, about 1855. 1855. The idea for ice hockey probably came from the older game of field hockey.
So, the game was first played in Canada, but it was originally just (real) hockey on ice, and was not first played by Canadians, but by Britons in Canada.
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"Bully!" --Teddy Roosevelt
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Yay! I had misconverted the numbers on the size of my pockets. The diameter is 40mm, which is the 1.5 inches mentioned on the website. So, mine is a proper carom board after all.
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If you're claiming ice hockey because it was invented in Canada by furriners you can't have basketball. It was invented by a Canadian but he came to US to do it. If we give you basketball you don't get ice hockey. Take yer pick.
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Yay! I had misconverted the numbers on the size of my pockets. Oh my, now that phrase could open up all kinds of possibilities! The first being that you are somehow obsessed with your trousers...  Welcome aBoard, Zed--a particularly appropriate term for a "longtime crokinoler"! BOY am I glad to find people who've not only heard of it, but have played it. And yes, I remember the pain when you're not careful!
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so which came first?I think this link not only answers the question but confirms the degree of tenuousness of the connection between the two games. http://www.netball.org/history.htm
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Thanks for this thread, Jackie. i have never heard of either game, but tonight, coming home, i drove down a side street in Flushing, (Queens)and passed 'the New York International ping pong club', 'the four seasons Billard club', 'Click, the internation internet cafe'... and the 'Carom Cafe'..
until this thread, i wouldn't have thought twice about the Carom Cafe, and would have just thought it to be place or family name...
Queens (one of NY boroughs) is about 100 square miles, and is one of the most ethnically diverse places in the world.
Flushing, just one subway stop (less than a mile) away from Shea Stadium, is home to NY's new little asia-- not 'china town', but a hugh multi ethnic community from all over asia, chinese, japanese, korean, filipeno, and all of the indian subcontinent... Flushing is home to NY's only hindu temple (and it is beautiful!-- i went to a wedding there) and several buddist temples.
It is sometimes overwhelming, but it is nice that the world has come to my doorstep. NY's "outer boroughs" are sometimes seen as less desirable, and more provincial than manhattan, but queens is really cosmopolitan, (even if it is only the plebians of all the world.)
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Much as I'd like to claim both hockey and basketball, if hockey was first played in 1855 then it wasn't played in Canada. Confederation was in 1867. ON the other hand if the same soldiers were still on the team 12 years later then we get to claim them and their chilly game as Canadian. After all having Don Cherry announce "It's Hockey Night in British North America!" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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Welcome, Zed! what a treat to have another Canuck a-Board.... You know, I used to claim zippers for Canada - until I learned the person who invented 'em was actually of mixed heritage and a late-comer to Canada. But I'm pretty sure we can take credit for snowmobiles, eh?! Certainly for the Canadarm...!
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take credit for snowmobiles
That *was an ironic statement, right? Kind of like claiming responsibility for bombing innocent pub patrons?
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ironic
I s'pose it's ironic if you hates 'em, and not if you doesn't....Note the clever use of "eh" after the statement, which could tip the scales either way.
In short: Some snowmobiles sure are worth taking credit for (the ones that are used for helpful things, such as transport in and between remote communities etc), and some ain't (such as the ones that people use to enter themselves as candidates for the Darwin award, by decapitating themselves on hydro and phone pole guy wires etc).
Once again, it's all about perspective...!
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IS more likely carom billiards. Give em a call and ask.
TEd
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