This summer members of the AFLCR and their friends ventured several times to Airport Park in Colchester to try our hand at the game of pétanque. Most of us were entirely new to it. Fortunately a few of us knew how it’s played and could guide our first steps. While pétanque is played in France, and around the world, at an international competitive level, it is played even more widely by groups of friends, by families, and by anyone from toddlers to nonagenarians.
the games’s capital
The principles of pétanque are quite simple: One person tosses a small wooden ball, called a cochonnet (little pig), a few yards from a starting point. Teams of players then take turns launching their larger, and surprisingly heavy, metal boules toward the cochonnet. The order of turns depends on whose boule is closest to the cochonnet, and points are awarded by those distances. When all boules have been thrown, the team with the most points—that is, the team with the largest number of boules closest to the cochonnet—wins.
Sound boring? Pas du tout! There are subtleties. And nuances. And strategies to be vigorously debated. (This game is French, after all.) You must maneuver around your opponents’ boules or knock them out of the way, preferably without knocking your own team’s boules away from the cochonnet. You must defeat the terrain: the dip, the awkward root, or the bit of gravel that sent your last boule off the piste. All this offers opportunities for the measuring of distances, for debate, with cheers for good shots and a few groans for poor ones.
Pétanque needs no special equipment or clothing. Thanks to the generosity of AFLCR members (we would like especially to thank Mel Bourgault and Marc Juneau), we have enough boules for all who wish to play. Pétanque is part of the warmth and fellowship of the summer season, though. We’ll throw our last shots on October 16 and start again after mud season. In the meantime, you can try playing a virtual game in the Google doodle of July 31, 2022 : https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-petanque. Then plan to come out and join us in the spring!
—Kathryn Trinkaus