A long waxed board down the side of the fellowship hall. Four pucks each, slide them to the far end, and only the side nearest the lip scores anything at all — so knocking the other fellow off is worth as much as landing well.

▾ Hide details

• Drag back from the board and let go, the way you would pull a puck before pushing it. The line shows your aim; how far you drag is how far it travels.
• The far end is banded 1, 2 and 3. A puck left hanging over the lip is worth 4 — and it takes almost nothing to knock it off.
• There are no rails. Slide it wide and it goes off the side; slide it hard and it goes off the end. Anything knocked back behind the foul line stops counting.
• Playing the house, only one side scores an end — whoever has the puck nearest the lip, for every puck of theirs ahead of the other side's best. Eight pucks, then the board is cleared. Whoever won the end slides first in the next one — which hands the other side the last puck down, and the last puck down is the advantage. First to 15.
• Against the house, simple plays the same match but counts it the easy way: both sides simply add up what they have in the bands, so a good end is always worth something.
• Two players, same device is the same match as against the house — the full rule, four pucks each, first to 15 — except that both sides are slid by hand. Pass the phone across when the board says it is the other player’s slide. The pucks under the board turn red or blue to show whose hand you are holding.
• On your own it is simpler again: eight pucks, and every one of them counts where it lies.
• The league players call them weights, by the way — discs are the other shuffleboard, the one played on a court with a cue.
• There are four houses, and they shoot better down the row: the Sunday Social is wide of the mark as often as not, Free Monday is steadier, Regular Tuesday steadier again and will take your best puck out, and Saturday Serious barely misses. Two of them — Free Monday and Saturday Serious — also play without the marker that shows where a slide would stop, so the pull is judged by eye. That is a different kind of hard, and it is why the row is not a simple ladder.
• 🎯 Premium members get five more boards to play on, the two middle houses — Free Monday and Regular Tuesday — and their pick of background music. The gentlest house and the hardest one are free, so the whole range of the game is there either way.

Rack ‘Em Up

‹ ›