Bear with me, this is probably going to be a long post.
The World Cup craze has infected my work place. My coworkers, who previously were only ever interested in American football, are suddenly obsessed with "soccer"; they're following all the matches, memorizing players names, rushing home after work to watch the games on tv, even listening to them during work on their earbuds. I think some of it may have to do with the fact that online betting is legal in Ohio now, and their interest may mostly be due to trying to find what the best bets are. (I admit, I've bet a few bucks here and there, despite knowing nothing about the sport.)
Anyhow, I had the thought that there are some sports I just don't like. Soccer, basketball, American football, volleyball... they hold absolutely no appeal to me. For some reason, I like sports where you hold some sort of stick that you have to whack the ball with. Baseball, cricket, hockey, hurling, golf, even tennis. I don't know why. But there was one glaring exception to this. Bocce. I like bocce.
I was bored at work, and my meandering mind had the sudden thought: why couldn't you play bocce with a stick? Well, bocce balls are pretty heavy. You'd have to have smaller, lighter balls. What kind of stick? Then croquet mallets popped into my head. Yeah. A cross between bocce and croquet! I figured someone else had already had such an idea, but I Googled it, and as far as I can see, there is no such thing as mallet bocce. I thought maybe I had the makings of a brand new game going on.
Bocce is played on a bocce court, and you can only throw the balls from one direction, like as in bowling. What if you could hit the balls from any direction?
As of this writing, I have yet to figure out rules and have acquired no equipment to try and work them out. Vitxalmour Conductour said that a normal croquet set would probably work, just adding in the little ball, the pallino, from bocce.
But then I thought, part of the fun of bocce is being able to bounce your balls off the side and backboards when making a shot. There would be nothing like that for this new game. What about some kind of obstacle? I then came up with this:
https://ibb.co/xt2VgdR9
A series of bumper pegs surrounding the pallino. (Which would mean that the pallino wouldn't just be randomly tossed, but placed within the bumper circle.) That could make it more challenging.
So, how many balls do the players get? How many turns per match? I imagined a larger, outer circle, from behind which you hit the balls. You could hit them from anywhere outside the outer circle. Hell, this is starting to sound like a cross between not only bocce and croquet, but crokinole as well!
That's all I have. I'm presenting this idea to my fellow Talossans, maybe you could come up with more ideas for rules and whatnot. I'm contemplating getting a croquet set, but, given both our current work schedules, it probably won't be anytime soon that Vitx and I would be able to field test such a game. However, when we do, I'd like to have a few variations of possible game rules and play that we could try out. Right now, I'm puzzling about certain things. If the pallino is knocked out of the circle during the game, how is that handled? How is scoring done? Most importantly...does this even sound like a fun game?
https://ibb.co/nqb9QH1t
I used ChatGpT to create this AI slop picture of what a match might look like. I also came up with a name for the game, Poggio. It's Italian for "hillock". (I don't like the Talossan word for hillock, "cantalour".) If we ever field tested this game, it would likely be in Vitx's backyard, which is fairly hilly. I just like the way the word Poggio sounds. I'm welcome to other ideas.
Anyway, this is the dumb crap I come up with to keep my mind occupied during my dreary and monotonous work day. If anyone has any ideas for it, I'm all ears.
Wow! That's super interesting. That would be the second Talossan sport, and it sounds like a pretty good one!
Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Today at 10:00:19 AMWow! That's super interesting. That would be the second Talossan sport, and it sounds like a pretty good one!
I did come up with another game not long after I became a Talossan, and thankfully no one remembers it. It was called "Lencularh" ("Lancerat" in English.) The gist of it was tossing a rope with a weight on the end into a series of stacked boxes to score points. I actually field tested that one and wrote out several pages of rules. The family members I coaxed into playing it seemed to enjoy it while we played, but it must have been fairly lame, because no one ever mentioned it again. (I know I posted about it on the old Witt.)