Andy’s New Age Kubb: The Endgame

We’ve all been there—the clock is ticking down, and the team on the other end of the kubb pitch is clearly taking their time so their opponent won’t get another chance to finish the game. Granted, this shouldn’t happen, because kubb is supposed to be the ultimate “gentleman’s” sport. It’s sad, but it’s true. Sometimes the competitive (human) nature of players will outshine the normal “sporting” qualities of those same people. What can be done about it?

Ideally, time limits would be eliminated entirely, and games would just go until there’s a winner… Problem solved. Sadly, however, if the kubbs just aren’t falling due to team inexperience, or possibly levels of intoxication, games could go on for hours. Side note: in my early days of playing kubb, before I knew anything about time limits, several players would get turned off because those games took so long to complete. People like my wife, who had fun playing, but would get bored after 75 to 90 minutes of back and forth because nobody could finish a game. By the time I went to my first tournament and learned about the 25 minute time limit, it was too late to save the game for her. She wasn’t the only one. So, time limits are definitely a plus to remove boredom, for one. Of course, another great reason is that we have a lot of rounds to get through in a tournament and we will run out of daylight long before we can finish if we don’t regulate the rounds.

The 25 minute time limit for rounds, with a “drop batons” rule at the whistle is a great way to keep the tournament running on schedule, but always bothered me because of the inevitability of one team believing that the other team intentionally stalled to “prevent us from having a chance to have another turn.” So, we are always in search of a fair (yet effective) compromise.

There is always the “team throwing finishes their turn” rule. I always thought this was a pretty good option. If you know the time limit is getting close, when the other team finishes their turn, one of your team runs up and grabs a fallen kubb, tosses it to their teammate on the baseline, who hurries and inkasts it in bounds. If that is done before the time limit bell sounds, the team gets to finish their turn. That method can, however, be mostly negated if the team throwing their turn prior is aware of the impending time limit and slows their throws down… just enough.

The accelerated finish rule is not without merit, as it takes “did not finish” completely out of the standings, but can end up being anything but accelerated if the two teams playing are having trouble taking advantage of the dwindling numbers of kubbs in play.

I invented a new endgame option that can curb either team’s ability to slow-play the other team out of the ability to win outright, while still being able to keep the total game time well under 30 minutes.

1. Lower the game time-limit to 22 minutes. (Or 22 and a half minutes, still testing)
2. At time limit, whichever team is on offense finishes their turn, and if they don’t end the game outright, the other team gets a final turn.
3. To determine who is on offense, a team officially takes over on offense as soon as the sixth
   baton has left the throwing hand of the other team.
4. Most importantly, no time-limit warnings should be given during the course of the game. The official timekeeper, alone, is aware of the impending limit.

While I am pleased with this system for taking care of some of the issues with current endgame approaches, it has been pointed out to me by Cody Glorioso that if we are trying to get kubb to a higher optics level (i.e television, Olympics), we need to explore ways to make the finishes more exciting. I will dedicate part five of this series to some ideas for ways to do just that.

Until next week, I need to get out and practice. Stoughton Invitational is just a few short weeks away. In closing, I did some deep digging and found this quote: