Musings of a Catholic Convert

Last weekend I participated in a cornhole tournament.  What is cornhole?  If you've ever played horseshoes or tossed washers you've played something similar.  Cornhole is played a lot like washers in that there is a slightly slanted plywood box with a hole.  There are boxes at both ends of the playing field (holes are supposed to be 40' apart I think).  Players take turns tossing bags filled with corn, trying to either land on the board (1 pt) or get in the hole (3 pts).  That's a super quick summary of the game. 

You play to 21 and your points each toss can cancel out your opponents, which makes both scoring and winning difficult.  For instance, if I get 3 bags on the board (3pts) and 1 in the hole (3pts) but my opponent has 2 bags in the hole (6pts), nobody scores that round (net 0).  Let me tell you, in our tournament there were plenty of those stalemate innings.  It made for a lot of ribbing and joking, especially as the night went on.  At any rate, there were a lot of people playing, and it was a lot of fun.  

Now that I've fully recovered from the weekend, I'm thinking I want to build my own cornhole set.  Basically, what I need to build is two boxes and eight bags.  I'm thinking that with the plans I found online I can probably build the whole thing in a day.  Even with painting and graphics work (I want to customize this thing), I may be looking at 2-3 days for the whole project.  It will give us another entertainment option for our backyard.

Now, here is my question for you.  Have you ever played cornhole?  Ever been in a tournament?  I was surprised to see online just how much interest there is in this game, even so far as to have an association and official rules.  I'm thinking by 2020 it will be an olympic event.  Olympic cornhole.  Wow. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 7:03 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.