Features
Easy Set Up
Sectional (can be expanded or shortened to fit your place)
Uses authentic balls and pins
Engineered to replicate the true pin action of Duckpin Bowling
Why is this so important? Duckpin Bowling could be considered the most appealing version of bowling to someone who has never experienced the game. Back in its heyday, Duckpins was 'the bomb', as they say. In the early days of duckpins in the Washington Metropolitan area, around 1920, the sport was often featured on the front page of the daily news publications, in which results from intra-city matches between DC and Baltimore were the talk of the town. Tenpin bowling received a lot of national acclaim, due to charismatic players like the legendary, Andy Varipapa. But duckpins was hot on the heels of the tenpin game. In 1940, there were approximately 700,000 tenpin bowlers, nationwide throughout America. Duckpins residing primarily on the east coast, from Maine to Florida, stretching as far west as Illinois in places, and boasted 325,000 league members. So, in less than half the real estate that tenpins encompassed, duckpins was right there in the participation numbers.
Going back further in time, it's reasonable to deduce that duckpin bowling pre-dated the tenpin game. There were stories that reported that duckpins was invented in the Baltimore area right around the year 1900, but there are actual newspaper articles in New England in the early 1890s (the Lowell Sun, as one example) that reference duckpin bowling in such a manner that it had apparently been around prior to candlepin bowling, which was in its infancy in the 1880s era. And if you really examine the scoring system of the tenpin game, even though a player is allotted 2 balls per frame, the scoring system for spares and strikes is based on a 3-ball system -- a spare, in which all pins are knocked down with 2 balls, counts as 10 plus the 1st ball of the next frame, while strikes are 10 plus the next 2 balls to be rolled. Duckpin bowling is a 3-ball system, with spares and strikes the same as tenpins, but a player simply gets '10' if s/he knocks all the pins down in 3 tries. So, if you were to objectively look at the 2 games and try putting yourself in the position of someone who lived back in the early 1800s, it likely makes more sense that a person would have initially carved small pins and balls out of wood for the sake of speed and cost, as opposed to crafting large pins and large balls, and then having to come up with a way to drill holes in the ball for a person's fingers to fit in -- drilling a hole in a ball in those days was probably not the easiest thing in the world to do. The duckpin game is more difficult due to the spacing of the pins, in which a ball can pass between the numbers 2 and 3 pins without hitting anything. This probably led to frustration, and people probably wanted a game in which the ball could not pass between 2 pins without hitting anything. Also, it seems more reasonable that the small pins would have existed first, and when a tenpin ball was developed, it was too big for reasonable pin action for the small pins, so a larger pin would next follow. It's been stated that bowling was brought to America by English, German, and Dutch settlers in a number of game variations, which would also have included lawn bowling, also using the smaller balls, as shown in this early drawing of a bowling match from artwork from the year 1670 (see picture).