At my parent’s house, there’s a little piece of history – and wonder – hidden under the sideboard.
A bagatelle board, picked up at an auction, back when my parents were keen to go to little local auctions as a way of picking up a few bits of furniture cheaply.
We had a lot of fun playing it, when I was a child, and it’s still working its magic on subsequent generations.
The board
It may help to think of this as an early pinball machine. Â In fact, there are pins, or rather nails, marking scores, and at times forming circles for the balls to go in.
The balls are actually ball bearings – so half the fun is the noise they make when you hit them. Â And to hit them, you have a wooden stick to push them up a side track on the board, and out into the scoring area.
(You can of course hit the balls, very hard, one after another, merely for the fun of the sound they make. Â Often, this is as much fun as actually scoring points.)
There is a half-arch of wood along the bottom of the board – this means that you can store it with the balls covered up, and I have a feeling that the wooden stick fits in there too.
Scoring
There are little indentations for the balls to land in, with numbers marked in beside them. Because you have a good number of balls – 12, I think – you can get quite high scores.
You get more for landing on the indentations than going into the circles, mainly because it’s harder to get the ball to stay in an indentation. If I remember rightly, the top individual score is about 500, so lots of counting opportunities (if you, or junior players, want them).
For an easy count up, you can just see how many balls land in an area where you score – and how many fall to the bottom of the board. Â Or you can look to see what the highest scoring individual area was.
But, to be honest, it’s all about the sounds: the click of the ball bearings against each other, the bashing sound when you hit a ball up and round, the slighter click when a ball comes to rest in a circle area.
No batteries. Â No rules, barring that of not hogging the board for too long. Â Occasional dusting required. Memory making: guaranteed.