Shove halfpenny
Shove halfpenny is a saloon pastime in the shuffleboard extended family, played mainly in the United Kingdom. Two players or teams compete opposing one another using discs or coins on a tabletop board.
Shove halfpenny is performed on a small, rectangular, smooth board usually made of wood. A volume of uniform lines or grooves run across over this board, spaced out by about one-and-a-half coin diameters. The spaces between the lines are called the “beds”. Five British Half Penny discs (now disused pre-decimalisation coinage) or likewise-sized coins or metal discs are located one-by-one at one end of the board slightly protruding over the perimeter and are shoved forward toward scoring lines, with a bat from the palm of the hand.
Competitors shove five coins or metal discs (Ha’pennies) up the board in every turn. To fashion each coin to be pushed, the player positions the Ha’penny at the front line of the board with the back or end part of the disc just sticking over the front edge of the board. Any component of the hand can then be used to prod the coin up the board. If a disc does not actually reach the first line on the board, that coin does not count as having been played and can be pushed again.
At the closing of the turn each disc that is dead within a ‘bed’ (amidst two horizontal lines and within the bordering vertical lines) scores a point for that player in that bed. The points are scored with chalk marks in the squares at either end of the bed on the boundary of the board, one player owning the right side, the other, the left. The intention is to get three chalk marks in each of the squares – three scores in each of the nine beds. However, once three scores have been made in a bed, any fresh scores in that bed will be given to the opponent instead, unless the opponent already has three scores in the bed. The one anomaly to this is the triumphant point which must be scored properly by the winning competitor, not given away.
Contestants will aim to cause a disc to knock onto one or more previously pushed ha’pennies in an effort to improve their position as well as trying to make a score with the ha’penny being played. A little thought is also required – it is not usually a good move to score the third coin in a bed until towards the end of a hand, so as to set up coins in positions that will better the chances that later coins will score by coming up from below and stopping behind the earlier discs. This is particularly true in the “progressive” variant of the game, where, after a player’s hand of five coins is complete, any scoring coins are recorded and then pulled back to be replayed in the same turn. A player may try to place early coins not only to promote scoring using later coins, but also in such a way as to be pushed by the later coins into positions where further scoring opportunities may be fabricated. Thus, in this version of the game, a very clever (and/or opportune) player could theoretically win the game in a single turn.
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