Kubb
Tales of playing the Swedish lawn game Kubb with friends and colleagues. I share snapshots of pickup games, tournament stories and even how we incorporate Kubb into our TeamSPS events.
Kubbchucks at 2017 Loppet Kubb Tournament
It was a surprise to me that this was our 6th year playing in the Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament. When we were getting ready to play there was some discussion about it, and I thought it was our 4th. A careful accounting of the years brought it to 6 though, and as Eric Goplin started the tournament, we gave a loud shout when he called out any teams that had been there for six years, which is how old the tournament is.
Garrick, Jim and I made our way to the pitches and took our spot in Group D. We played We B Kubbing, Ice Kubb’s YouKubb Channel and Little Lebowski Urban Achievers in the round robin. The Lebowski’s were the 2016 Consolation Champions. We were the seed into the group with our T-9 place from 2016.
We were able to make it through the round robin 3-0. Our match against the Little Lebowski’s didn’t complete, we were ahead 1 game to 0 and ahead on the baseline when they called time. We were close to closing it out but didn’t get it done. The winter tournament has strict 45 minute time limits for round robin matches. The Ice Kubb’s we finished pretty quickly with a 2-0 win and were able to retire to the warming tent for some chili and a beer. We B Kubbing we started ice cold with and couldn’t hit anything. We lost our first game but the batons came back, and we finished it out 2-1 with plenty of time left.
We went into the championship bracket and the round of 16. This is dangerous territory for the Kubbchucks, it’s where we typically fall apart and lose terribly bad. We steeled ourselves for it and went in throwing well. It all worked out, and we took a 2-0 match against a team that I can’t recall the name of. All of the round of 16 games ended quickly, so we moved quickly on to the next round and played Strike Without Warning in the quarterfinals.
Strike Without Warning took us down so fast we hardly knew what was going on. They hit pretty much everything they threw at, and we were out 0-2 within about 15 minutes. We didn’t have a chance. They also went on to win the entire tournament.
We had a great day of Kubb and left with our best place ever, T-5. We’ll get a nice seed next year which hopefully we will use to our advantage for a 7th year showing! If you’re looking for something fun to do in the winter and live in the area, you should get yourself to the Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament!
Kubb legends.
USA Kubb Championship 2016
Gorgeous day for US National Kubb Championship!
Kubbchucks team shirts this year are awesome!
Kubb everywhere at US National Kubb Championship USA Kubb Championship!
Kubbchucks go 3-0 in USA kubb round robin!
Kubbchucks knocked out. Thanks US National Kubb Championship for USA Kubb Championship!
Sumo Sighting
SumoLogic Sumo Sighting on Kubb King at #TeamSPS TechJam event…
Sumo Sighting with Surly Brewing at #TeamSPS TechJam event…
Showing Isaiah Kubb.
Kubb sets at Target. Wow.
@thingles that's a @marimekkousa #kubb set @Target pic.twitter.com/dhg13T7T8N
— Jason "Birdtowner" Greenberg (@hdntwnctz) April 24, 2016
Fun Kubb event!
https://t.co/L4OwMhwBT6 - the Kubb Krawl is on! Target Field to @CHSFieldStPaul May 7th! https://t.co/hYD8tzd778 pic.twitter.com/SDoeZVCRl2
— Minnesota Kubb (@MNKubb) March 8, 2016
This summer I’ll have Basketball, Kubb, Horseshoes, Bags, Ladder Golf and “home” disc golf course at the cabin. Outside all day! 👍🏻😀
Can’t wait to see those on the Kubb pitch!
Our 51 new @JPbackyardgames kings are coming along. #8mForLife pic.twitter.com/vTA6cCByjH
— US Kubb Championship (@USAKubb) December 19, 2015
Kubb starting with Minnesota Kubb getting things going!
Ready for Kubb practice! 42 batons!
Tammy and I played our inaugural game of Kubb at our cabin. Seemed appropriate to do so with an official USA Kubb set!
Magic Pines
After years of talking about getting a cabin we have finally made the big leap! Tammy has been looking at cabins for a while now and we found one that really fits what we were looking for. It’s close to home (45 minutes from our house!) has a great, warm feel and is on a good sized lake with just over an acre of land. Great spots to play outside, setup a Kubb pitch, hang a hammock and have a fire pit along with a dock to get on the lake. It already has a name, Magic Pines.
We close in January and are excited for fun weekends away. This is completely new territory for us. It’s going to be a fun adventure!
Question2Answer Number Captcha
I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.
Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!
I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:
This works really well. You can grab
q2a-number-captcha and
git clone it for your own use.
SPS Kubb Class
Garrick and I joined forces and auctioned off a Kubb Class at the annual SPS Charity Auction this year. The sales engineering team won the event and we got 12 of them together this past week for a tournament level Kubb class. It was an awesome time with a ton of great questions on the game and a jump-start into Kubb strategy and technique.
Great Kubb event with #TeamSPS today! Sporting Planet Kubb shirts and US National Kubb Championship set!
Gorgeous day for US National Kubb Championship!
Kubb at Lake Harriet
Most of the time when I see people playing Kubb around Minneapolis they are folks I know from Minnesota Kubb. It was fun today to stop on a bike ride around Lake Harriet and right by the bandshell were 6 women having a nice game of Kubb. They were playing with a Bex set, the pitch was a bit small and they were doing that weird thing where you stack field kubbs on top of each other. But, they were having a blast throwing wood!
At Nomad Pub Minneapolis for Burroughs Bocce Cup! Bocce is no Kubb, but still lots of fun. I wonder if PlanetBocce.com is available. 🙂
