The teamwork aspect of the game adds a whole new level play. Certainly both games require strategy as well as flicking skills, but Fingerboard is much more dependent on teamwork. Winning the game requires that your partner sometimes uses their turn in order to send coins over to your side so that an easy shot into one of the closer pockets is possible.
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Fingerboard is different because hitting coins that are far away from your striker is such a difficult thing to do. But all you really want from your partner in Crokinole is good shots that score well. The other surprisingly fun thing about this game to me is how important good teamwork is to winning. Sometimes the striker goes flying off wildly in the wrong direction, but that seems to be part of the fun. I have played many times now, but still haven’t quite mastered it. This was an entirely new skill to me and took some time to get used to. A player puts a finger INTO the depression and then without moving any part of their arm, FLICKS the striker into play.
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Instead, the striker has a hollowed out depression in the middle of the top. You do not “flick” the striker from behind the way you do in Crokinole, or ANY other flicking game I have ever played. The differences are that you always shoot your striker from a defined half-circle area in front of each player, and in the way that the striker is propelled. The striker is much like the cue ball in pool as it is used to “strike” the coins into the pockets. Each player has their own larger disc known as a “striker”. The first surprise is in the way that you hit the red and white coins. Seems simple enough, but there were a number of very fun surprises. Like pool, there is even a blue coin, which is sometimes called the oumatjie, donkey, or decider, that needs to be sunk last in order to win the game.
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There are pockets in each corner and one team tries to sink all of the red coins while the other team tries to sink the white coins. The game is basically a combination of Crokinole and Pool. The slick play area seems to be made of masonite and comes with some very specific instructions for care.įingerboard has a simple set of rules that are really quite intuitive. The board that I played on was from Xpat Fingerboards and was framed in beautiful natural wood, with a very nice rubber “bumper” attached all along each inner side. The game has evolved over time and is now played on a beautiful wooden board and uses plastic disks called "coins". Fingerboard, I have learned, is an old South African game first played many years ago by railroad workers who used wooden disks as playing peices, and a coin or button as the final peice (picture here as a blue disk). I love dexterity games, and “flicking” games in particular, so I was surprised to find that there is an old classic out there that I had never even heard of called Fingerboard. From South Africa comes an entirely new FLICK!