around the world in 80 plays
ESTONIA
Words by Chad Wilkinson
On the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea lies Estonia, the focus of this month‘s tabletop tour. A century ago, as trade opened up between Estonia and Great Britain, something else besides timber and bacon traversed the Baltic Sea. Koroona took inspiration from carrom; a game the British had themselves adopted from India, and it soon became Estonia‘s national game. Using a metre-squared, typically birch board – pocketed in the corners – and several coloured discs, Koroona sees players flinging a puck with a small cue stick as they attempt to pocket eight of their object discs. Sailors from the port city of Tallinn developed the game during their repeat trade voyages, seeing it as a perfect and much more stable alternative to billiard type games which, of course, were unsuitable for the frequently turbulent seas. From the port cities Koroona soon spread inland, its popularity leading to the creation of clubs and tournaments in the late 1920s and early 1930s.