WA pub game is one which is traditionally played in or outside a pub or bar. Most pub games date back many years and are rooted in village culture. Many derive from older outdoor sports.
WAunt Sally is a traditional English game usually played in pub gardens and fairgrounds, in which players throw sticks or battens at a model of an old woman's head. Leagues of pub teams still play the game today, throughout the spring and summer months, mainly in Oxfordshire and some bordering counties.
WBagatelle 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. Bagatelle is also laterally related to miniature golf.
WBar billiards is a form of billiards which developed from the French/Belgian game billiard russe, of Russian origin. Bar billiards in its current form started in the UK in the 1930s and now has leagues in Sussex, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, Suffolk 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.
WBat and trap is an English bat-and-ball pub game. It is still played in Kent, and occasionally in Brighton. By the late 20th century it was usually only played on Good Friday in Brighton, on the park called The Level, which has an adjacent pub called The Bat and Ball, whose sign depicts the game. Brighton & Hove City Council started a Bat and Trap club based at The Level in 2013, as part of the Activities Plan associated with a £2.2m Heritage Lottery Fund and Big Lottery Fund-funded restoration of the park.
WThe British and World Marbles Championship is a marbles knock-out tournament that takes place annually on Good Friday and dates back to 1588. It is held at the Greyhound public house in Tinsley Green, West Sussex. Teams of six players participate to win the title and a silver trophy. The event is open to anyone of any age or nationality. Over the years, players from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Estonia, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Wales and the United States have participated alongside English teams.
WCribbage, 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.
WDarts or dart-throwing is a competitive sport in which two or more players bare-handedly throw small sharp-pointed missiles known as darts at a round target known as a dartboard. Darts players are sometimes termed "dartists".
WDevil among the tailors is a pub game which is a form of table skittles.
WDominoes is a family of tile-based games played with gaming pieces, commonly known as dominoes. Each domino is a rectangular tile with a line dividing its face into two square ends. Each end is marked with a number of spots or is blank. The backs of the tiles in a set are indistinguishable, either blank or having some common design. The gaming pieces make up a domino set, sometimes called a deck or pack. The traditional European domino set consists of 28 tiles, also known as pieces, bones, rocks, stones, men, cards or just dominoes, featuring all combinations of spot counts between zero and six. A domino set is a generic gaming device, similar to playing cards or dice, in that a variety of games can be played with a set.
WNine-ball is a discipline of the cue sport pool. The game's origins are traceable to the 1920s in the United States. It is played on a rectangular billiard table with pockets at each of the four corners and in the middle of each long side. Using a cue stick, players must strike the white cue ball to pocket nine colored billiard balls in ascending numerical order. An individual game is won by the player pocketing the 9-ball. Matches are usually played as a race to a set number of racks, with the player who reaches the set number winning the match.
WPool is a classification of cue sports played on a table with six pockets along the rails, into which balls are deposited. Each specific pool game has its own name; some of the better-known include eight-ball, blackball, nine-ball, ten-ball, seven-ball, straight pool, one-pocket, and bank pool.
WPub golf or bar golf is a recreational drinking game involving a selection of either nine or eighteen pubs, creating a "course" to be played by two or more people. It is essentially a pub crawl made into a game. Unlike the actual game of golf, pub golf involves no ball or fairway.
WA pub quiz is a quiz held in a pub or bar. These events are also called quiz nights, trivia nights, or bar trivia and may be held in other settings. Pub quizzes may attract customers to a pub who are not found there on other days. The pub quiz is a modern example of a pub game. Although different pub quizzes can cover a range of formats and topics, they have many features in common. The pub quiz was established in the UK in the 1970s by Burns and Porter and became part of British culture. The Great British Pub Quiz challenge is an annual event. Pub quizzes are a staple event at Irish pubs, where they are usually held in English.
WQuoits is a traditional game which involves the throwing of metal, rope or rubber rings over a set distance, usually to land over or near a spike. The sport of quoits encompasses several distinct variations.
WShove ha'penny, also known in ancestral form as shoffe-grote ['shove-groat' in Modern English], slype groat ['slip groat'], and slide-thrift, is a pub game in the shuffleboard family, played predominantly in the United Kingdom. Two players or teams compete against one another using coins or discs on a tabletop board.
WShut the box, also called Blitz, Canoga, klackers, batten down the hatches, kingoball, trictrac, cut throat, fork your neighbor, and jackpot, is a game of dice for one or more players, commonly played in a group of two to four for stakes. Traditionally, a counting box is used with tiles numbered 1 to 9 where each can be covered with a hinged or sliding mechanism, though the game can be played with only a pair of dice, pen, and paper. Variations exist where the box has 10 or 12 tiles. Alternatively, dominoes can be used for the tiles – this also provides the option of using up to six dice if a Double 18 domino set is used. A deck of cards can also be used as tiles, and if so desired a complete conventional Western deck with the jokers can provide for the use of up to nine dice. As described below under Variants, the dominoes or cards can also be used in place of the dice if so desired.
WSkittles is a historical lawn game and target sport of European origin, from which the modern sport of bowling is descended. In regions of the United Kingdom and Ireland the game remains as a popular indoor pub game. A continental version is popular in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Other varieties of bowling are more popular in Australia, but the similar game of kegel, based on German nine-pin bowling, is popular in some areas. In Catalonia, bitlles, a local version of this game, was formerly popular..
WSnooker is a cue sport that was first played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century. It is played on a rectangular table covered with a green cloth, with six pockets: one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. Using a cue stick, the players take turns to strike the white "cue ball" to pot the other twenty-one snooker balls in the correct sequence, accumulating points for each pot. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points by the end of the frame. A snooker match ends with one of the players having won a predetermined number of frames, thus winning the match.
WTable football, also known as table soccer, and known as foosball in North America, is a table-top game that is loosely based on association football / soccer. The aim of the game is to move the ball into the opponent's goal by manipulating rods which have figures attached. Although rules often vary by country and region when the game is played casually, at the competitive level table soccer is played according to a unified code.
WToad 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.