Skittles (sport)

Skittles is an old European lawn game, a variety of bowling from which ten-pin bowling, duckpin bowling, candlepin bowling (in the United States), and five-pin bowling (in Canada) are descended. In regions of the United Kingdom and Ireland the game remains a popular indoor pub game. A continental version is popular in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Other varieties of bowling are more popular in Australia, but the similar game of kegel, based on German nine-pin bowling, is popular in some areas. In Catalonia, bitlles, a local version of this game was formerly popular.

The game shares its ancestry with the outdoor lawn game known as bowls and is thus distantly related to billiard sports, some of which also retain the use of skittles. The skittle dates to the earliest known forms of bowling and ground billiards, even as far back as c. 3300 BCE in Ancient Egypt.

Skittles is usually played indoors on a bowling alley, with one or more heavy balls, usually spherical but sometimes oblate, and several (most commonly nine) skittles, or small bowling pins. The general object of the game is to use the ball(s) to knock over the skittles, either specific ones or all of them, depending upon game variant. Exact rules vary widely on a regional basis.

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