Duck Pin Bowling

Yup! You heard me correctly...Duck Pin Bowling! That was are adventure last week. Since moving to RI all the locals we have gotten to know have said "You have to go! It is very Rhode Island!" and Rhode Islanders love doing anything Rhode Islandish. So we called up some of our friends and made it a group date!



So the basic rules of Duck Pin Bowling are that the ball is smaller, about the size and weight of a shot put. There are ten pins, probably half the size of normal bowling pins. You get 3 chances to roll the ball. If you knock down all the pins it is a strike. On the second roll, if you knock down all the pins you get a spare, just like normal. The third roll is just to up your score so if you knock down the rest of the pins you get a pat on the back and just a normal 10 points, nothing extra.

The bowling alley we went to was classic! Probably build 50 years ago. We had to keep score manually (yeah it took us a while to remember how to score strikes and spares!), push a button to reset the pins at the end of our turn and push a different button to get rid of deadwood, or the pins that fall down during your 3 rolls. Chris was having a blast pushing buttons.



Duck pin bowling is deceptively hard! We waltzed in there assuming we would blow everyone away. I mean come on an extra chance to bowl, we were going to knock down all the pins every time! Boy, were we wrong!

That ball is so small that if you throw it too hard it is like a bullet and it just plows through one single row pins. Too slow and it rolls into the gutter. The key was a medium speed so that the ball curved slightly and would roll into multiple rows since the pins don't really do a good job at knocking each other down. Putting spin on the ball is hard too since it is so small and there are no holes for your fingers you simply palm it.



Overall, we had LOTS of laughs and LOTS of fun. We'll definitely be back for more bowling! By the time we leave RI we plan on being experts!