No tipcat (not: no tip cat)

[hrj]

Alas, tipcat has had to be scratched from the Games Tourney lineup. (This is the game I've been describing as "tiddly winks played with sticks".) When I got one stick roughed out enough to try out, it failed utterly to perform up to expectations. This annoys me not only because I thought it would be fun to include, but because normally I have a pretty good instinct for the physics of things. In my mind, I could see how it would work. I dislike having my instincts fail me. They've saved me an awful lot of trial and error over the years.

Comments

[fitzw.livejournal.com]

Tipcat -- wasn't that used by Laurel & Hardy as a weapon in their version of "Babes of Toyland", using darts instead of cats?

[jducoeur]

Okay, you've gotten the Waks Research Library intrigued. Having not come across Tip-Cat before, my immediate reaction was "Is that period?". Which, having tracked it back from Gomme through Strutt to Singman and Willoughby, I find that it more or less is.

Anything we can do to help? While I'm at best a passing researcher, I do have a really, really good library when it comes to period games (basically a full bookcase on the subject), and msmemory found some websites with pictures of extant period cats (which seem to match the crudely-drawn pictures in Willoughby), along with a US Patent for a newer, better shape for the cat.

Out of curiosity, which version of the rules were you thinking of playing? I'm finding several variants from the 17th through 19th centuries.

(And in case it isn't obvious: thanks for an excuse to do some amusing research. I'm going to have to put a new section into the Period Games Page...)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Anything we can do to help?

Well ... the event is tomorrow, so probably not. I think I ended up with nearly two dozen games in the line-up, and I'd eliminated others on various grounds. It's just annoying to have gotten as far as doing the carpentry before I decided to eliminate it.

My research hadn't gotten as far as rules -- pretty much just "see who can make it flip the highest/farthest". I'm pushing the "fun activites" angle a bit more than the rules and competition angle for this event. (Several of the game descriptions that I've found either allow for several possible variants, or are a bit underspecified in the details.) After the event is over, I suspect I'll go back and pin down the details more strictly -- fill in the citations for the game descriptions and so forth. In case you missed the full context, the event is the Principality of the Mists Games Tournament (which has been interpreted in various ways over the years ... the basic idea is "play" in some form). I got the idea to do a Games Tournament around Brueghel's "Children at Play" painting, partly because I like "high concept" events, and partly because I think it would be fun to get a few more simple period games into circulation.