Shuffleboard History and Rules

Shuffleboard is actually a distant cousin of billiards, and has much in common with the television show Laverne & Shirley. How so? Both shuffleboard and Laverne & Shirley Maude were successful spin-offs. While Laverne & Shirley was a spin-off of the sitcom Happy Days, shuffleboard is, like billiards, a spin-off of lawn bowling. Although a distant cousin of billiards, which can also be traced back to lawn bowling, shuffleboard is closer to its other cousins curling and bocce ball.

The earliest known record of shuffleboard goes all the way back to England during the 13th century. (That means the 1200s.) Shuffleboard is also related to modern skateboarding in a fashion: both have been banned at one time or another. During its infancy stages, the game of shuffleboard was considered far too frivolous a pursuit for a proper Englishman to take part in and was thus actually banned for a period of time. During that early period, it was still yet to be known as shuffleboard. Too bad the original name didn’t keep, the game might be more popular today among the youth if they could just say they were going out to play a game of shove board or slide groat. Well, maybe not.

Shuffleboard made its first appearance on the shores of England West, or as I like to call it, the United States of America, sometime around that period when Henry David Thoreau was building a little cabin next to a pond called Walden. New England in the 1840s was the time and place for shuffleboard to take America by storm. Of course, almost from the beginning it was banned here as well. Not because it wasn’t a gentleman’s pursuit, of course. No, remember that even as late as the 1840s—heck, even as late as the 2000s—the Puritan strain still infected American society. Thus, shuffleboard in America was banned because it was thought to be a gambler’s game. Hard to imagine betting on shuffleboard, but, well, there it is.