Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as cushions. Cue sports are also collectively referred to as billiards, though this term has more specific connotations in some varieties of English.
Cribbage, or crib, is a card game, traditionally for two players, that involves playing and grouping cards in combinations which gain points. It can be adapted for three or four players.
Bar billiards is a form of billiards which involves scoring points by potting balls in holes on the playing surface of the table rather than in pockets. Bar billiards developed from the French/Belgian game billard russe, of Russian origin. The current form started in the UK in the 1930s and now has leagues in Norfolk, Sussex, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Yorkshire and Northamptonshire. These counties comprise the All England Bar Billiards Association. There are also leagues in Guernsey and Jersey where the annual world championships take place.
Skittles is a historical lawn game and target sport of European origin, from which the modern sport of nine-pin bowling is descended. In regions of the United Kingdom and Ireland the game remains as a popular indoor pub game.
Bagatelle is a billiards-derived indoor table game, the object of which is to get a number of balls past wooden pins into holes that are guarded by wooden pegs; penalties are incurred if the pegs are knocked over. It probably developed from the table made with raised sides for trou madame, which was also played with ivory balls and continued to be popular into the later 19th century, after which it developed into bar billiards, with influences from the French/Belgian game billard russe. A bagatelle variant using fixed metal pins, billard japonais, eventually led to the development of pachinko and pinball.
Golf billiards is a pocket billiards game usually played for money. Unlike the majority of such games, it allows more than two people to play without compromises or rule changes. The game borrows from the outdoor game of golf, which is historically related to the cue sports. It is usually played on 10-foot or 12-foot snooker tables as their size and structure are more appropriate. In 2006 the Billiard Congress of America commented it was more popular than snooker in the United States.
Aunt Sally is a traditional English game usually played in pub gardens and fairgrounds, in which players throw sticks or battens at a ball, known as a 'dolly', balanced on top of a stick; traditionally, a model of an old woman's head was sometimes used. Leagues of pub teams still play the game, throughout the spring and summer months, mainly in Oxfordshire and some bordering counties. In France, the game is called jeu de massacre.
Devil among the tailors is a form of table skittles which is usually found as a pub game in England. It is likely that the game emerged between 1675 and 1783 and surged in popularity during the 1920s and 1930s before waning again. Today it is found in scattered pockets across most of the country.
Toad in the hole is a pub game, involving throwing brass coins at a lead topped table with a hole in the middle. The game is a more refined version of the coin-throwing game pitch penny.
Table skittles is a game in which a ball or spinning top is used to knock over skittles on a small board, usually placed on a table. Table skittles are almost always made of wood.
Indoor games and sports are a variety of structured games or competitive physical exercises, typically carried out either at home, in a well-sheltered building, or in a specially constructed sport venue such as a gym, a natatorium, an arena or a roofed stadium.
The following is a glossary of traditional English-language terms used in the three overarching cue sports disciplines: carom billiards referring to the various carom games played on a billiard table without pockets; pool, which denotes a host of games played on a table with six pockets; and snooker, played on a large pocket table, and which has a sport culture unto itself distinct from pool. There are also games such as English billiards that include aspects of multiple disciplines.
A lawn game is an outdoor game that can be played on a lawn. Many types and variations of lawn games exist, which includes games that use balls and the throwing of objects as their primary means of gameplay. Some lawn games are historical in nature, having been devised and played in different forms for centuries. Some lawn games are traditionally played on a pitch. Some companies produce and market lawn games for home use in a front or backyard.
Five-pin billiards or simply five-pins or 5-pins, is today usually a carom billiards form of cue sport, though sometimes still played on a pocket table. In addition to the customary three balls of most carom games, it makes use of a set of five upright pins (skittles) arranged in a "+" pattern at the center of the table. The game is popular especially in Italy and Argentina, but also in some other parts of Latin America and Europe, with international, televised professional tournaments. It is sometimes referred to as Italian five-pins or Italian billiards, or as simply italiana. A variant of the game, goriziana or nine-pins, adds additional skittles to the formation. A related pocket game, with larger pins, is played in Scandinavia and is referred to in English as Danish pin billiards, with a Swedish variant that has some rules more similar to the Italian game.
Cribbage, sometimes called cribbage pool, fifteen points and pair pool, is a two-player pool game that, like its namesake card game, has a scoring system which awards points for pairing groups of balls that total 15. Played on a standard pool table, participants who pocket a ball of a particular number are required to immediately pocket the companion ball that tallies to 15 when added to the prior ball's number. Each pair so pocketed counts as a cribbage; there are seven such pairs, and the 15 ball counts as an eighth by itself after all of the others have been pocketed. The first player to score five cribbages wins the game.
Trucco is an Italian and later English lawn game, a form of ground billiards played with heavy balls, large-headed cues sometimes called tacks, a ring, and sometimes an upright pin. The game was popular from at least the 17th century to the early 20th century, and was a forerunner of croquet, surviving for a few generations after the introduction of the latter.
Tokyo Friend Park 2 is a Japanese game show that premiered in April 1994 on the Tokyo Broadcasting Station (TBS). TFP2 airs on Monday nights roughly from 6:55 - 7:54 JST in Japan.
Ground billiards is a modern term for a family of medieval European lawn games, the original names of which are mostly unknown, played with a long-handled mallet, wooden balls, a hoop, and an upright skittle or pin. The game, which cue-sports historians have called "the original game of billiards", developed into a variety of modern outdoor and indoor games and sports such as croquet, pool, snooker, and carom billiards. Its relationship to games played on larger fields, such as hockey, golf, and bat-and-ball games, is more speculative. As a broader classification, the term is sometimes applied to games dating back to classical antiquity that are attested via difficult-to-interpret ancient artworks and rare surviving gaming artifacts.
Pin billiards may refer to any of a fairly large number of billiard games that uses a pin, or a set of "pins" or "skittles". The earliest form of billiards, ground billiards, was played with a single pin called the "king". Table billiards kept the king until the mid-18th century. There are billiard games played with as many as thirteen pins.
