: 43 Some contemporary sources depict the same game being played both with the hand and with a mace, and show a distinctive teardrop-shaped king pin design, : 34, 43, 47 with a rounded, wide bottom and a slender top. It is clear that bowling, in its ancestral form of skittles, shares a common origin with ground billiards, as the two game types share both the basic objective, to direct a rolling ball towards one or more targets, and similar equipment, aside from the mace. The game's relationships to bowling, golf, hockey, and bat-and-ball games are not entirely certain. Ground and table billiards were played contemporaneously, : 36 and the outdoor version remained known until at least the beginning of the 19th century : 4 derived lawn games like croquet continue to the present day. Some later stick-and-ball games, including cricket, also evolved multiple pin targets over time. : 3, 6, 7 : 57–67 Use of the king pin declined first in most areas, followed by the abandonment of the port arch, though many variants featured both as well as pockets, : 57–67 while the king survived and even multiplied in some cases, leading to such modern cue games as five-pins.

As a broader classification, the term is sometimes applied to games dating back to classical antiquity that are attested via difficult-to-interpret ancient artworks and rare surviving gaming artifacts.Įngraving from Charles Cotton's 1674 book, The Compleat Gamester, showing the same game, including port and king, and finely-developed maces, being played on a 17th-century pocket billiards tableĮven in the late 17th to early 18th centuries, indoor billiards was essentially the same game, with smaller equipment and played on a bounded table, with or without pockets. Its relationship to games played on larger fields, such as hockey, golf, and bat-and-ball games, is more speculative. The game, which cue-sports historians have called 'the original game of billiards', : 117 developed into a variety of modern outdoor and indoor games and sports such as croquet, pool, snooker, and carom billiards. Ground billiards is a modern term for a family of medieval European lawn games, the original names of which are mostly unknown, played with a long-handled mallet (the mace), wooden balls, a hoop (the pass), and an upright skittle or pin (the king). Single opponents shown in illustrations doubles or teams mentioned in 1674 indoor rules This version uses a port (arch) and conical king pin, is bounded by a wicker railing, and appears to make use of one ball per player, with more than two players. Ground billiards in 15th-century France (1480 woodcut, based on the Saint-Lô Tapestry).

Legacy billiards mesa table