Games
At the George Inn we pride ourselves on offering many a traditional pub game and a few more modern ones as well. We even dedicate Sunday evenings to playing!
Shove Ha'Penny
players take turns to push coins up a board with horizontal lines across it. The areas between each pair of horizontal lines are called a "beds" and the objective is to push the coins so that they land squarely in the beds without touching the horizontal lines. To win, a player needs to get a coin in each bed 3 times which is no easy task for the beds furthest away from the front of the board. If a player manages to score three coins in one bed in a single turn, he is said to have scored a "sergeant"; once a bed is full any further coins landing in the scoring area awards a point to the opposing player!
Pool
Darts
Shut the Box
An old pub gambling favourite, Shut the Box uses two dice and a special wooden playing tray. The tray features the numbers 1 - 9 in a row, each of which has a hinged or sliding cover. A turn involves repeatedly throwing the dice and shutting or covering a number or pair of numbers every throw. The turn ends when no numbers can be covered upon the throw of the dice at which point the player's total is calculated. The overriding goal is to completely cover all numbers or "shut the box" which results in the best possible score of zero.
Long Alley Skittles
Western Alley Skittles is the most popular and basic version of Alley Skittles wherein 9 skittles are arranged in a square at the end of an alley. The alley is around 24 feet long and each turn starts with all the skittles standing and consists of three throws down the alley. If all the pins are knocked down, then they are all reset. So the maximum score in one turn is 27.
Spoofing
Cribbage
A standard Cribbage board is a lesson in functional simplicity. Each player moves a pair of pegs up the outside and down the inside of their side of the board. The front peg shows the current score while the rear peg shows the previous score - a device that efficiently prevents mistakes and allows opponents to curtail any surreptious cheating. The holes are clearly divided into sets of five, a fact that allows large scores to be tallied immediately without counting and means that a quick glance is all that is needed to determine who is winning and by how much. A complete trip up and down the board is 60 holes but each end has a finishing hole into which the winning peg is placed. Thus, games scored using a Cribbage board are usually first to 61, 121 or 181.