Some games just asked to be taken into your life in a serious way. Carrooka is one of them. Many of the most ‘important’ games of the hobby are huge, you can skim down the Board Game Geek rankings and find boxes that weight that of a small car, with game lengths that eventually span into days, and with a table presence that requires binoculars and semaphore to properly plan a turn.
Carrooka has a different impressiveness of scale, it’s just a lovely, huge, piece of wood. A little bit Carrom and a little bit Snooker is a dexterity game played on a large wooden, and most importantly circular, board. You flick discs like you do in the ancient Indian game of Carrom (without all the powder, thankfully) but you have snooker pockets and follow the usual rules for snooker (pot a red disc, pot a coloured disc, and so on). And despite this very simple idea, it’s a little bit magic.
We talk to George, one half of the Carrooka team about creating the game, its success, and why you should give it a spin.
TURNING THE TABLES
On the Sunday afternoon of Tabletop Gaming Live 2022 I was knackered, wandering around looking for interesting things for this magazine. Or so I thought. In fact, I was looking for somewhere to have a sit down. Which is what the very kind George offered me at the Carrooka stand.
I took a shot. It should be easy right? It’s just snooker with flicking. I mucked it up, naturally. And then as I contemplated whether I’d need to flick the disc backwards towards myself in an awkward way, George turned the tables on me. Not figuratively, literally. See, Carrooka comes not only hand made in the workshop by master carpenter Jack (and George, but less masterfully) but on the gaming equivalent of a Lazy Susan. With a gentle turn of the edge of the board the whole thing rotates, making your shots easier, and, importantly at the last day of a weekend long show, without standing up.
“The quirky and key thing is that it rotates,” says George, “so the idea is you can sit at a table and essentially have a game of snooker or pool but using pucks or discs instead of balls and using your finger instead of a cue.”