Blog: 5 Awesome Games You Hardly See Played In Pubs Nowadays
Forget boardgames and fruit machines, these were the games locals enjoyed before pubs started serving hipster beer and fancy food.
- Bar billiards.
This game’s like pool, but more complicated. Instead of pockets, holes are sunk into the table and are worth various points. Skittles are placed around the holes and mustn’t be toppled – otherwise that’s a foul. Whoever manages to score the most points within the set time, and after all the balls have been sunk, wins.
- Table skittles.
Table skittles involves a lot of skill and precision. The idea is to swing the ball and knock down as many skittles as you can. Each player has three goes each turn, and the first to 101 wins.
- Table football.
Everyone knows the rules of table football. Two pairs of players compete against each other to score as many goals as possible within a set time. This was more popular among the student crowd, but still made it on the popular 1970s pub television game show ‘The Indoor League’. The standards were really high, and as serious players will tell you, spinning is absolutely forbidden.
- Shove ha’penny.
It’s one of England’s oldest pub games. Each player ‘shoves’ five coins along a board etched with distinctive horizontal grooves. The idea is to try and get the coin to stop within two of the lines, known as a ‘bed’. The winning player must score three coins into each bed on the board.
- Yorkshire darts.
It seems hardly any pubs have a darts board or team anymore – but many of us know the rules. Yorkshire darts is played on a Yorkshire Dartboard which is a forerunner of the current standard board. It has no trebles or outer bullseye. The rules are the same as regular darts with games played in 301, 501 or 701 formats.
And you can watch players battle it out at these retro pub games on The Indoor League presented by legendary cricketer Fred Trueman. The show airs Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays at 6pm. On Sundays it’s screened at 10am.
