When I left, it appeared that they all made it through until at least 4pm…

i LOVE this game, we play this every Christmas!

ONE piece went missing… but that’s ok!

Does anyone know where you can buy the wooden crokinole pieces? I picked up a used board but have been looking all over Van for those tiny puck-like missiles!

I started playing with my roomies 4 or 5 years ago and it is a great game. We randomly started calling the pieces “biscuits”. When a tricky shot came up it was “risky biscuits”. Then we found out this

The name “Crokinole” derives from the word “croquinole”, Quebec French for “cookie” (or “biscuit” in British English).
-Wikipedia

I competed in the 2008 World Crokinole Championship in Tavistock, ON. We placed 109th / 114 competitors in doubles play. It was unreal!

cool! also a great link here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Crokinole

If you don’t like the link, here is some great history on crokinole!

The earliest known crokinole board to date was built by Eckhardt Wettlaufer of Sebastopol, Ontario, Canada as a fifth birthday gift for his son, Adam, who was born on December 31, 1871. The board now resides at The Joseph Schneider Haus Museum in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada as part of their Harvest Collection. Several other home-made boards of southwestern Ontario origin, and dating from the 1870s, have been discovered since the 1990s. It seems to have been patented on April 20, 1880, in New York City by Joshua K. Ingalls.

Crokinole is often believed to be of Mennonite or Amish origins, but there is no factual data to support such a claim. The reason for this misconception may be due to its popularity in Mennonite and Amish groups. The game was viewed as a rather innocuous pastime – unlike the perception that diversions such as card playing or dancing were considered “works of the Devil” as held by many 19th-century Protestant groups. The oldest roots of crokinole, from the 1860s, suggest the British and South Asian games are the most likely antecedents of what became crokinole.

In 1899, Crokinole was revolutionized by what is still known today as the “Eagan Opening”. Thomas Eagan developed a complicated, 3-turn hybrid opening sequence in Tottenham, Ontario that confused, and ultimately defeated, the Perth County players. The Eagan Opening has never been published, but appears to have been passed down generation by generation to Thomas Eagan’s descendants by word of mouth. What is known is that, on the initial shot, the “20? is missed on purpose, with the disc being left on the edge of the 20-hole. Then, depending on the opponent’s response, the second or third shot is left behind the player’s front-left peg that requires absolute precision for the opponent to remove. Even if the opponent was capable of “breaking through” the Eagan Opening, which the Eagan family themselves were experts at, it often caused such mental exhaustion that it resulted in defeat over the course of the game.

In the late 1940s, a crokinole playing family from Northeastern Newfoundland named the Fitzgeralds visited Tottenham on a cross-country tour. They introduced the Eagan family to the “Coachman’s Screen”, which purposely lulls the play into the 5-point area on the opponent’s cross-side. The Eagan and Fitzgerald families soon learned that the Eagan Opening and Coachman’s Screen, when used together, made them virtually unbeatable. Within the local church, after the Catholic mass on Sunday morning, they taught each other the angles and the succession matrix of each technique.

In 2006, a documentary film called Crokinole was released. The world premiere occurred at the Princess Cinema in Waterloo, Ontario, in early 2006. The movie follows some of the competitors of the 2004 World Crokinole Championship as they prepare for the event.

It is well known that the best players in the world skip the WCC and are descendents of the Eagan-Fitzgerald Cabal of the late 1940?s. The extended family are said to secretly get together once a year in various parts of North America on a rotating basis. Slater himself is rumoured to have been trained by Eagans still residing in Southwestern Ontario.

It has been suggested that those within the current crokinole establishment have purposely suppressed the stories of the Catholic, Amish, Menonite, Metis, and First Nation communities on the impact they have had in the history, traditions, and strategy on the game as we know it today.