Bagatelle
From Free net encyclopedia
←Older revision | Newer revision→
- For other uses, see Bagatelle (disambiguation).
Bagatelle (from French by way of the Italian bagattella, a trifle) is an indoor table game related to billiards, the object of which is to get a number of balls past pins (which act as obstacles) into holes. It is the precursor of the pinball machine.
The game bagatelle evolved from efforts to bring outdoor games, such as Croquet and Shuffleboard, inside and atop tables. History records the existence of table-based games back to the 15th Century. While some games took the wickets and balls of croquet and turned them into the pockets of modern billiards, some tables became smaller and had the holes placed in strategic areas in the middle of the table.
In France, during the reign of King Louis XIV, someone took a billiard table and narrowed it, placing the pins at one end of the table while making the player shoot balls with a stick or cue from the other end. Pins took too long to reset when knocked down, so the pins eventually became fixed to the table and holes took the place of targets. Players could ricochet the ball off the pins to achieve the harder, higher-scoring holes.
In 1777 a party was thrown in honor of the King and his wife at the Chateau D'Bagatelle, owned by the brother of the king. The highlight of the party was a new table game featuring the slender table and cue sticks, which players used to shoot ivory balls up an inclined playfield. The table game was dubbed Bagatelle by the King's brother and shortly after swept through France. Some French soldiers carried their favorite bagatelle tables with them to America while helping to fight the British in the American Revolutionary War. Bagatelle spread and became so popular in America as well that a political cartoon from 1863 even depicts President Abraham Lincoln playing a tabletop bagatelle game.
Although its name could allude that it was based on pachinko, the TPIR game Plinko bears more resemblance to bagatelle.