Matthew BaileyGame 32# of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is a little-known game called “Tiddlywinks” played with Jack(9) and Toby(6).
“Tiddlywinks” is a classic game that I hadn’t thought about much recently until we played “5Up” a week or so ago. While playing that game, we used the counters to flick around much in the vein of “Tiddlywinks.”
This set me down a bit of a rabbit hole, looking into games that use the “Tiddlywinks” mechanics. Surprisingly, there are barely any modern games that use “Tiddlywinks” as a mechanic. Should I ever get around to designing my own game, I am starting to think that “Tiddlywinks” might be one of the key methods of interacting with the game itself.
I looked into the English Tiddlywinks Association (ETA for short) through their 1998-style GeoCities website. I checked out the in-stock and out-of-stock tournament-standard wink sets, which you have to buy by contacting someone named Tim via email. You probably then have to send a postal order or some coins taped to the back of a piece of card.
Anyway, I decided to skip that and went with the most common set I could find on Amazon, which is the “SUPERetro Games” set pictured here.
Firstly, I am glad about the correct use of retro. As a massive video game fan, one of my biggest annoyances is the fact that the video game community uses the word retro to mean old when they actually mean classic. Retro is something new designed to look old, and in this case, this is retro because it’s a new “Tiddlywinks” set designed to look old, as opposed to if I had actually bought an old copy of “Tiddlywinks,” which would then be classic and not retro. Anyway, end of a weird video game-adjacent rant.
So in the set, you have a “Tiddlywinks” box, a couple of middle targets where you want to land your winks, and four sets of winks and squidgers. Three of those sets had an extra wink, but whatever. You then play a simple game where you take turns flicking your winks, trying to get them onto the scoreboard.
Firstly, what was quite interesting is I don’t think I quite realised that I didn’t really know the actual rules of “Tiddlywinks.”
Another deep dive online revealed that there have actually been a lot of amendments to the rules of “Tiddlywinks” over the last 20 years. I resisted the urge to go down another rabbit hole seeing what those amendments were, but I am sure that will make for fun late-night reading (my wife is so lucky).
So the actual rules of “Tiddlywinks” involve just a pot, and you try to pot 6 and pot out. This version actually doesn’t want you to put the winks in a pot. In fact, if you tiddle your winks into the pot in this version, you actually lose those winks. What you’re trying to do is get them on the scoreboard.
Once you have played all of your winks, you can then pick up all the ones that have either scored or not scored, except the ones that are in the cup. If they’re in the cup, they are out, and you play another round, obviously with fewer winks if you got some of them in the pot.
This continues until one person has 50 points (or 50 tiddlies) and wins the game.
From a components point of view, the box is actually quite nice and everything’s well done. The “Tiddlywinks” themselves are obviously quite cheap and plasticky, but they work fine for what we wanted. As such, this set cost me about £5.99 on Amazon, and for that price, I was more than happy with getting a good hour of play. We will definitely play this again.
What I really want to ask, though, is does anyone know of a much higher-quality set? I could order them from the aforementioned Tiddlywinks Association, but if possible, I would quite like a nice wooden box or presentation set or something of decent high quality that we can play with. Equally, if you can think of any other games that use the “Tiddlywinks” mechanic as a means of scoring or attacking or anything really, then I would love to hear it.
So that has been probably the most convoluted review I’ve ever written, with a bajillion tangents, but to sum up, “Tiddlywinks” is actually really good fun and is something which doesn’t really appear in modern gaming. As such, I would highly recommend getting a set… Then recommending me a good one…
