Pitchnut

Pitchnut is a wooden tabletop game of French Canadian origins, similar to carrom, crokinole and pichenotte, with mechanics that lie somewhere between pocket billiards and air hockey. Unlike with pichenotte, there are no records of pitchnut being mass-produced; all existing boards are handmade and frequently handed down from generation to generation. The game is common on the farming villages south of Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada and Amherst, Massachusetts.

Very little about the history of the game has been written. Crokinole historian Wayne Kelly states that the game may be one of many efforts to combine crokinole with pichenotte, the French Canadian version of carrom. A similar board was patented in 1893 by E.L. Williams, but that game board had 8 pegs in the center of the board (like crokinole) but had only one peg in front of each pocket. Wayne Kelly's crokinole.com web site shows an image of a board that looks very similar to pitchnut (called "improved crokinole), but the pegs in front of the pockets take the form of a wicket through which the players had to shoot their pieces, according to Mr. Kelly. Pitchnut was primarily played in the farming villages around Coaticook, Quebec, where Achille Scalabrini built the games during the twentieth century. As descendents of those villages moved to small cities and the U.S., the game has spread. High school teacher Lee Larcheveque has built more than 160 pitchnut boards. His former students have brought their boards to colleges across the United States.

The game is played on a wooden board, normally 28 inches square. It differs from carrom and pichenotte boards in that it has a 2-inch gutter along the entire circumference of the board. Eric Harbec, a pichenotte player in Sherbrooke, Quebec, theorizes that the recessed gutters were added to direct playing pieces toward the pockets. In Carrom or pichenotte, a piece that is struck will not be guided towards the pockets. Pitchnut also has 4 pegs (or "screws") in the center of the board and two pegs in front of each pocket. The game is played with small disks (crokinole pieces or wooden checkers).

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Wikipedia