Open Loop #3 - Kubb Fever

2012-07-23: Kubb!

Notes & Links

• Beer: unknown
• Why we crazy about the Kubb?
• 2012 USA National Kubb Championship
• Kubbchucks v Tad Kubbler Game 1
• Kubb and Koffee, Tuesday Friendlies
• US Kubb Nationals, what was it like
• How did the “big show” work
• Our games, eternity…
• Sunday - the finals
• Planet Kubb Notation & Planet Kubb Scoresheet

Transcript

Speaker-labelled transcript, machine transcribed and cleaned up with AI in October 2026. It may still have mistakes. Also as WebVTT and JSON.

Jamie: Hey, Garrick, do you know how long it’s been since we did an Open Loop?

Garrick: Way too long.

Jamie: A month.

Garrick: A month.

Jamie: Yes, a month. It’s the 20th of July today, and the last time we did an Open Loop, it was the 20th of June. Just our third episode, we had a month break.

Garrick: I wanted summer.

Jamie: Yeah, but it was like 8 million degrees.

Garrick: Yeah, it was way too hot to record a podcast.

Jamie: Exactly. You can’t record podcasts in that kind of heat. It’s bad for your microphone. We also played a lot of Kubb.

Garrick: Oh, we played a lot of Kubb.

Jamie: Can we talk about that lunch Kubb when it was like 120 degrees?

Garrick: The one at Cancer Park?

Jamie: Yes.

Garrick: You, me, and Jake?

Jamie: Yes. The game of Kubb where I seriously, I, my shirt was so wet when I came back from playing Kubb at lunch that, I mean, two hours later I was still damp.

Garrick: It was a hot day, and it was a long game. Long games.

Jamie: They were long games. They weren’t that long, though. We’ve come to learn. All right.

Garrick: What’s an hour, really?

Jamie: What’s an hour? I mean, an hour, that’s just, that’s nothing.

Garrick: Yeah, that’s like a half marathon. I’m training for this half marathon.

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Garrick: And along the way, you know, the training program has you doing 5Ks and moving up from there. And along the way through that, one of the 5K runs is going to coincide with the annual Village Fest 5K community run.

Jamie: Okay.

Garrick: And I’ve run that a few times since we’ve been here. And, you know, I’ve never had any expectation of actually doing well and

Jamie: Okay.

Garrick: I similarly have no expectation of doing well in this half marathon that I’m training for, yet last weekend

Jamie: You had lots of expectations of doing well.

Garrick: expectations of at least playing competently. I should have just thrown those out the window.

Jamie: We did play confidently. We had high hopes.

Garrick: We had high hopes of being able to hit an 8 meter.

Jamie: All right, by the way, this is going to be the Kubb episode of Open Loop. We’ve talked about Kubb in the last three episodes. We’ve just gotten back from the U.S. 2012 Kubb National Championships, and we decided we’re going to just talk about Kubb this whole time. With one exception, we’re going to talk about a beer too, right?

Garrick: We talk about a beer, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, and we’re not drinking the same beer tonight. You have no idea what beer I’m drinking, and I have no idea what beer you’re drinking. I think we should try to guess.

Garrick: Yes. You think we should try to guess?

Jamie: Not the specific beer. That’s way too hard. But I’m going to go first and I’m going to say that you are drinking something. I’m going to say it’s something dark.

Garrick: It’s something dark.

Jamie: Yes. Is it?

Garrick: No.

Jamie: Damn. Didn’t even get the first one. Are you drinking one of your beers?

Garrick: Drinking one of my beers.

Jamie: Are you drinking a cider?

Garrick: No.

Jamie: Or not a cider, but a…

Garrick: I’m drinking my amber.

Jamie: Nice.

Garrick: It’s the bottle that you have with an A on it.

Jamie: So I could be drinking that beer.

Garrick: Could be, but you don’t need to be.

Jamie: Okay. I will give you a hint about

Garrick: Great.

Jamie: the beer that I’m drinking. I looked at my fridge, our friend Jake Freiberg, fellow kubber, he often will say in reference to something that he sees that that’s Minnesota Kubb style. And so, for example… When there’s a picture of a couple guys winning a Kubb tournament and they’re wearing, for example, just like a white undershirt, that’s Minnesota Kubb style.

Garrick: Okay.

Jamie: So with that, what beer am I drinking?

Garrick: You know, the first one that comes to mind, I don’t think you would drink.

Jamie: What’s that?

Garrick: I would say with that description, I would say Fulton’s Lonely Blonde.

Jamie: Oh, dude, that’s way too highbrow. Way too highbrow. Way, way too… No, no, no. Try again.

Garrick: The only other one is Summit IPA.

Jamie: Yeah, I’m gonna tell you, Grain Belt Nordeast.

Garrick: Oh, jeez.

Jamie: See?

Garrick: See, that would be badminton in my book.

Jamie: Badminton, don’t they have horses or something?

Garrick: For badminton? That’s what horses do. They swim.

Jamie: Anyways, I’m having a Nordeast. We don’t need to talk about the Nordeast, but I do want to hear a little bit about your amber. How’s it going?

Garrick: This amber is the first beer that I started when I was doing all grain brewing. And this is my second round with it a year later. It’s still not there yet. I keep learning from it. It’s a fine beer.

Jamie: So Kubb, we

Garrick: Kubb!

Jamie: haven’t talked about why it is that we like it so much.

Garrick: There are discrete parts and skills within Kubb that I think are unexpected, and I think it’s one of the reasons I like them.

Jamie: Like what?

Garrick: One, there’s the 8-meter throw. And if you don’t have an 8-meter throw, you can’t move the game forward, period, right? But there’s also the inkasting, which is throwing something that is not a baton, that means square block, right? You’re throwing a square block and trying to be good, trying to hit a target with a square block, which is kind of a really weird skill. I mean, it reminds me of like Hayward Lumberjack Days. And then the second skill is, or the third skill is throwing short. Throwing at that cluster, that was inkast, right? So rather than for one, you’re going for lots, which is a different technique.

Jamie: Power. Yeah, power and a little finesse too in that one.

Garrick: Three very different skills. And I mean, in golf you have different distances and different clubs, but you don’t necessarily have as diverse a skill need, right?

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Garrick: I’m thinking about this while I’m running. I’m thinking all I need right now is the wooden pieces and I could play Kubb. You don’t need gear.

Jamie: Which is a little bit surprising for me because, you know, the more gear the better for me. But it is, the simplicity of it is, it masks the complexity though. I mean, there’s so much to the game, so much strategy to the game that isn’t apparent when you just pick it up, but it scales. I think that’s what’s kind of fun about Kubb is that it scales from that very first kind of backyard game all the way up to like very aggressive championship game in a tournament.

Garrick: Nothing is added to

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: do that scaling. It just is what it is.

Jamie: Yeah, it’s the same game.

Garrick: There are a few things that can scale that widely and not change dramatically. So we’re doing our best to try and change that.

Jamie: Exactly.

Garrick: Because it’s not like you’re going to be using the Kubb, playing a Kubb notation in your backyard game, you know.

Jamie: No, that would be a little odd.

Garrick: But, you know, maybe, maybe at a Kubb & Koffee.

Jamie: Oh, I think at a Kubb & Koffee you would. I think at a team practice you would.

Garrick: For sure.

Jamie: Because it’d be, that’s, you know, you’re going to use the notation to see how the team is doing and where you need to improve, you know, how to move your game forward. We’ve been playing Kubb for what, six months now? We have our team, the Kubbchucks. The Kubbchucks entered into the national championship that’s held at Eau Claire every year. So last Saturday we spent all day, and

Garrick: All day.

Jamie: I mean all day, playing Kubb. We played Kubb for seven, seven and a half hours. We were outside for 10 hours. It was a hot day. And man, was I just toast at the end of that.

Garrick: Totally, completely. That was one of the hardest days I have ever had.

Jamie: Yeah. I got done with that day and I looked in the mirror and I seriously was like, I think I aged 10 years out there on those pitches. And I just felt really exhausted. We had a tough draw in the tournament. We were in Group E, and

Garrick: Mm-hmm.

Jamie: we played three teams, the Blue Footed Footies, right?

Garrick: Kubbies.

Jamie: Kubbies, the Swedish Ice Kubbs, and then the infamous Tad Kubbler.

Garrick: Yes. I love those guys. I really love those guys.

Jamie: Yeah, they’re awesome. We see them a lot, so we’re biased. I just think they’re just a ton of fun, and Eric is just like couldn’t be a nicer guy. Cole is a trip and just like, I just love to just chat with Cole and hear stories. And Anders seems like super cool as well, a little quiet, but super cool.

Garrick: At the Tuesday night friendlies, I play Eric, I play Anders. We played Cole a little while ago. In the friendly, one-on-one, it’s a… I have a blast. I just have a great time. And then in the tournament, three-on-three killed us.

Jamie: Oh, terrible.

Garrick: Just killed us.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Part of it’s completely my fault. But, you know, so big old fat… You know, one of the things I’ve been thinking about in the notation is this notion of errors, right? That whole game just got a big fat E on it.

Jamie: You know, I thought a lot about error. In the very first kind of revision to the notation, I actually considered putting an E in the notation. And I didn’t, because it requires judgment. And, you know, just like in baseball, I mean, an error is assigned. Yeah, I don’t know baseball well. Now, maybe there’s some binary stuff that says like, if this happens it’s an error, but I think there’s also a little bit of judgment where somebody says like, okay, yeah, no, that was an error. So that’s the only reason why I didn’t put it in there.

Garrick: That’s fine. I think errors can be sussed out from the rest of the annotation, but anyway. Anyway,

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: we go back to our play. So maybe let’s talk about the structure of the tournaments, because I am really liking the structure that I’ve seen of the two tournaments that we’ve played in.

Jamie: Right. Well, we start with the round robin.

Garrick: It’s four teams all playing each other.

Jamie: Yeah. And it’s a necessary phase, because there’s no way to qualify the teams that are coming into the tournament, because most of these teams don’t even exist before the tournament. I mean, there’s a decent number of recreational players that are coming there, they’re just there to try playing kubb in a competitive manner. And so, you know, there’s no way to seed people. So that’s where your round robin comes into play.

Garrick: Right. And, you know, I think the Blue Footed Kubbies were something of sort of equivalent to us at our last tournament,

Jamie: Dude.

Garrick: like not quite exactly sure how all of this works, but super enthusiastic.

Jamie: The Blue Footed Kubbies were us. And yeah, they totally were. They even did the same, like, hey, now the kubb goes out, right? No, no, the kubb doesn’t go out. Let me teach you, young man, the kubbs never go out. So they were the first team that we played, and I was super pleased with the game, because I felt that we… I thought we did a fine job. We had some nerves. We weren’t hitting as good as we typically do, but you know, we did okay. I felt okay going into the next round. I actually felt like, all right, good, that’s exactly what should have happened. We didn’t give them a game, right? We won two matches, two games to none. Yeah.

Garrick: Should have happened, yes.

Jamie: And off we go. And then we hit the Swedish Ice Kubbs. We took the first game.

Garrick: We took the first game.

Jamie: The first game went exactly as it was supposed to go. It lasted, what, ten minutes? It wasn’t that long. We played, you know, with confidence, and it went very well.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: And it was like, okay, good. You know, now we’ll just take another one. We’ll get a little rest. We’ll take our licks with Tad Kubbler, but, you know, we’ll come in good. Then we played the second game.

Garrick: Completely different story, for like an hour. Yep. And they won.

Jamie: And they won. Is it the third game that we couldn’t hit anything, or was it the second game?

Garrick: I think it was the second game that we just couldn’t hit anything.

Jamie: Threw 40 batons at their baseline, didn’t hit a thing. At least, I mean, you can’t… no.

Garrick: You can’t win like that.

Jamie: You can’t win like that. You should just stop, just hit the king. It’s just terrible. I mean, we were so cold. It was, I mean, and we’re getting in our own heads. Both you and I were getting in our heads. Jake was maybe a little bit in his head, maybe a little less though.

Garrick: You know, you’re in a tournament setting, things just fall the opposite way that you expect them to. All those things, you just dig yourself into a hole.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: You’re like, I got to hit this, and then you miss, and it doesn’t help, you just get deeper.

Jamie: So we lose that match. And we played too long. An hour and a half to lose a match. I’m not sure that they were just a family out having fun.

Garrick: I think so.

Jamie: Well, they were there on Sunday.

Garrick: Yeah, they were there on Sunday.

Jamie: So, I mean, maybe they were just checking things out, but, you know, a lot of people weren’t there on Sunday. They were there on Sunday.

Garrick: They were there on Sunday, and

Jamie: So what else?

Garrick: You know, I talked to the guy afterwards. He was from somewhere, they were from somewhere in Wisconsin.

Jamie: Yeah, and you know what, they were at the Culver’s we went to.

Garrick: You know what, they were from Chippewa Falls. They were?

Jamie: Mm-hmm.

Garrick: Crazy.

Jamie: I didn’t notice at the time. We were walking out and there’s a guy and he obviously recognized me and he was like, hey, and I was like, I have no idea who this is. And I recognized like a little bit after that, wait a second, mustache. That was that dude. That was the dad.

Garrick: Crazy.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Altoona. They’re from Altoona.

Jamie: Yeah. So that was terrible.

Garrick: Yeah, it was terrible. And then we just got smoked by Tad Kubbler, but we sort of knew that was going to happen.

Jamie: Yeah, we knew

Garrick: How can it not?

Jamie: that was going to happen. But honestly, three turns. I mean, we lost our first game against seven. Three turns, I mean, that was… yeah.

Garrick: That was ridiculous. I mean, you know what I should have done, here’s my second throw on that kubb, I should have walked to the other side of the pitch, or the other, right, and just toss the kubb at the king.

Jamie: Oh, yeah.

Garrick: Instead, worst placement of a penalty kubb for guys who can’t hit an 8 meter ever.

Jamie: So, so that game’s on Planet Kubb. We’ll put a link to it so people can take a look at it, but it’s terrible. Three turns, we lose. Tad Kubbler completely just spanks us. You know, they were nice guys about it and everything, but they were, yeah, it was tough. So then we come out of it.

Garrick: I mean, they tied for fifth last year, and Eric runs the Minnesota Kubb tournament, and, and, and, you know, all these ands just mean experience. Months and

Jamie: Yeah, yeah.

Garrick: we’ve been playing for six months.

Jamie: So hope and ambition doesn’t equal experience.

Garrick: No, no matter what my intern says.

Jamie: We went through it, and we made it through the quarterfinals. We came out of the quarterfinals, what, we came out of the quarterfinals 1 and 2, and we, you know, in hindsight, I think we really narrowly escaped the consolation bracket.

Garrick: Very narrowly escaped it.

Jamie: Had to, consolation bracket. Yes, had to.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: But we got into the, we played into the championship bracket. We had to play the Engineers.

Garrick: So that game lasted a gazillion hours.

Jamie: Two hours, 20 minutes for

Garrick: Two hours, 20 minutes?

Jamie: a match of three.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: We played great kubb. It was great.

Garrick: Great kubb. I think each round, each game we had 10 kubbs out, and

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: I love the notion that if you get 10 kubbs out, now you’ve got a kubb game.

Jamie: Yeah. Now we’ve got a kubb game here.

Garrick: Yeah, Eric Anderson, the organizer, came by like three times saying, guys, seriously.

Jamie: Where you at?

Garrick: Oh, yeah.

Jamie: We’re going to have to hurry this up. We have to call it.

Garrick: I don’t want to put a time limit on you guys, but you should be done by now.

Jamie: Yeah. And we weren’t. That is where we finally kind of came up to, I decided that I would not drill again the rest of the tournament. You would do all the drilling. And we, you know, Jake is always in the middle, interestingly enough, right? Jake stayed in the middle playing cleanup.

Garrick: Yep.

Jamie: And then I moved to the kind of attacker, which was weird because that wasn’t what I thought I should do, but, you know, I kind of liked it. I didn’t mind it at all.

Garrick: Good. Yeah.

Jamie: I didn’t mind that at all.

Garrick: That inkasting for that long,

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: that is, that is work.

Jamie: You’re tired. Yeah.

Garrick: And so I’m glad that Jake stepped in from time to time and you stepped in from time to time to take those first hits off the inkast.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Because I just didn’t have it in me. After I just throw one more thing, I just don’t get it in me.

Jamie: Yeah. That’s where the specialty play comes in, because I think if it’s a tight grouping, particularly if you have an advantage line, I can put a pretty good amount of power on that. I’ll come in there and take that. But otherwise, I kind of like being at the end. I did. So we played that game and we won. So then we got into the round of 32. We played the Good, Bad, and the Ugly.

Garrick: Held our own? Held our own for a good… hours?

Jamie: Solid. Solid game. Hour and 40 minutes.

Garrick: We were there.

Jamie: Had a lot of spectators at the end, which was super cool.

Garrick: Yeah, it was nice to see the guys from the Knockerheads coming by, and Tad Kubbler came by to watch the game for a while. That was fantastic.

Jamie: Yeah, and they were cheering on, and that’s when we got the, oh no, it was actually at the other game, didn’t we, that the let’s go, Kubbchucks.

Garrick: Yeah,

Jamie: That’s

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: the obvious. That game, we did good, we did okay. We lost. Yeah, we lost. It would have been great to move on, but we lost. And those guys then lost in the next round.

Garrick: Yes. Yes. I think the next round was the Kubbsicles anyway.

Jamie: Yeah, I think the Good, Bad, and Ugly played the Kubbsicles.

Garrick: Yes. And we would have just been smoked. We would have been done then for sure.

Jamie: The Kubbsicles lost one game. It wasn’t against them. It was against Kubbs. Kubbs. No. I can’t remember. They did lose one game. I don’t remember who. So that’s our first Nationals appearance.

Garrick: I would very much make it analogous to running a marathon or a triathlon or your inaugural appearance at the Tour de France.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: You don’t know what you’ve walked into, and it’s going to take you a while to look back and say, yeah, that was fun.

Jamie: And you know what, we gotta take a moment here to just say, I mean, Eric Anderson, he just — I couldn’t say enough good things.

Garrick: That was amazing, amazing work. No.

Jamie: I mean, the tournament was awesome.

Garrick: Organized like this was —

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: I’m sure that he was continually wanting to make sure everything went right, and I’m sure it did.

Jamie: I thought, you know, I particularly liked — I liked that in the round robin they had the pieces of paper and you knew what teams you were supposed to play in what order.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: And in general I liked the pieces of paper. I liked writing down the outcome of the match and then carrying that in and turning it into the people keeping track of the bracket. They

Garrick: We all have our special skills.

Jamie: That’s right. That’s right. Like double checking that everything’s written right on that piece of paper. Or we would have been in the consolation bracket for sure. When we got done, Garrick put us as losing our first match instead of winning it. Luckily I checked, changed it. What I should have done is fix that Swedish Ice Kubbs one, if you know what I mean.

Garrick: Oh, yeah.

Jamie: Anyways, so it was super fun. I had a great time, and we’re going back. We’re definitely going back. We’ve got another tournament this year. We’re gonna do the Dallas six-person tournament, right?

Garrick: Absolutely. I got buy-in from Jim today, and

Jamie: Oh, good. So we’re…

Garrick: what, you know, he’s thinking Jake, because the ages would be more —

Jamie: Oh, so we’re thinking the kids?

Garrick: Thinking the kids, yeah.

Jamie: I think we do it. If we can make that work, I think that’d be great. We go and play with our children, it’d be fun.

Garrick: And you know, I wouldn’t have even considered that, considered that until I saw the Ringers, that

Jamie: Right. Talk about that.

Garrick: was amazing. So it’s the Ringers

Jamie: You were moved.

Garrick: are Aaron Ellringer, his father, his son, and their nephew. And so, four-man team, the kids are 9 and 11 or something like that, and they’ve got one baton, the adults have two batons, but the kids are taking the lead. Or the kids have first right of refusal on the lead. So

Jamie: No, those kids weren’t messing around.

Garrick: No, they weren’t. And they were hitting great eight meters, knocking out penalty kubbs, just calm as cucumbers, just great shots, and they look like they’re having great fun, you know, piggyback rides between turns and just hanging out and like And if you walk in with that — I know Aaron plays world-class kubb,

Jamie: Yeah, yeah.

Garrick: but at this tournament, he’s playing with his family, and they’re making great shots, and they’re having great fun, and that’s got to be so much better. I was scoring them on Sunday, which means they made it into the quarterfinals. You’re making the quarterfinals with your kids.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: That’s a fantastic weekend.

Jamie: Well, and I tell you, I mean, on the night before, on Saturday, you know, that kid comes up there and takes that king shot with the sixth baton. He misses. They go again. And he just walks out there, no hesitation, and knocks that king down.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: I mean, everybody, who didn’t cheer? Everybody cheered.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Everybody was just ecstatic. Just, yeah, little, a little tear, little tear.

Garrick: Absolutely.

Jamie: You gotta admit.

Garrick: That fun and camaraderie is the only reason you would do six person.

Jamie: Yeah. Yeah.

Garrick: Right. Although, I mean, I’m just going to have a blast with these people I’m hanging out with today.

Jamie: Yeah. But at the World Championships, they do six, and I don’t think that’s just, well, fun.

Garrick: I will have to have an experience at a six-person tournament to really understand the strategy that goes into the

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: things that have been magical to me about kubb just don’t exist in a six-person team.

Jamie: Well, we’ve got to go to Rome.

Garrick: We got to go to Rome.

Jamie: So Kubbchucks are going to be back, and next year I think we set our goal: one more round, maybe two more rounds. That’s our goal. Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah. I had so much fun on Sunday scoring the games. And I got as nervous in some of those games just scoring, just watching, just keeping track of what’s going on, as I did actually playing the day before. I don’t know. I don’t know that I need to. I’d be okay.

Jamie: Just doing that and

Garrick: Maybe next year we just place well on Saturday, and then

Jamie: then watch, yeah.

Garrick: a year after we try to get to Sunday. Yeah.

Jamie: So you mentioned scoring a couple times, so should we talk about that?

Garrick: I really like this. This to me is a useful contribution

Jamie: Definitely.

Garrick: to the world of Kubbadians, and I’m really excited about it. It’s fast. You can do it for… recorded games. I think both of us have tried to score during, like, watching a game on YouTube.

Jamie: Yep.

Garrick: You can do it during a live game, you can do it during practice if you want. I don’t recommend it.

Jamie: Yep. Throws your game off.

Garrick: Throws your game off. But it’s fast, and I think it’s very expressive, and I think it’s very powerful. And less so in just what you’re writing down, but more so in what you can extract from what you write down. Right? Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, yeah.

Garrick: So there’s a link on the Open Loop for this Planet Kubb notation, and Jamie and I have been working on this for a while now, I think almost from the very beginning. We wanted a way to describe games, and I think we’ve pretty much nailed it. Just a handful of letters out of the alphabet combined with some numbers, you know, because you need numbers. And you get something that you can very much describe a turn. Maybe not, you know, nine-year-old Colton takes the king, but can if you want to.

Jamie: Yeah?

Garrick: So, yeah.

Jamie: Put that in the notes. So we’ve been trying to figure out — I mean, we’re not the first people to try this, a lot of people have tried this. You know, I want to score a game, or I want to… And “score” is a little bit of a miss. It’s

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: it’s not the greatest word, because it makes you think you’re saying, you know, well, this team’s got 12 points and this team’s got 18 points, and that’s really not — it’s really about scoring like you would score a baseball game, where you score where the runners are and who advances who, and how many RBIs did this person get, you know. And that’s really kind of what you do with it and what the score sheet’s all about. I mean, you can put that into the computer and get all sorts of interesting statistics, but at no point does it ever generate an actual score. Maybe at some point in the future it would.

Garrick: What’s the word, dictating or annotating

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: or those

Jamie: It’s like, right.

Garrick: are, I think, probably more accurate verbs than scoring, but I think Thanks, Corina. easy

Jamie: And I think

Garrick: to understand.

Jamie: the key here is to really focus, crazy focused, on the notation, because the notation to me is the bedrock. If you get that right, then, I mean, you could have 17 different score sheets, and you could put it in any number of different computer programs that would churn interesting things, or you could just store it in text files, for all that really matters. But if you don’t get the notation right, you can’t express the game. And so we had a pretty good set of notation going into Nationals, and then we expanded it when we were at Nationals.

Garrick: Because what came out of Nationals when you and I were scoring the games was really the expressiveness that was lacking on the inkasting.

Jamie: Yeah, and then what was so fun is it just totally happened organically. I was scoring that game and I’m like, huh. I’m really not doing anything during this phase of the game. And so… But yet there’s activity happening in the game, so I should probably be capturing that in some way. And so I just drew these, this little two additional boxes and said, okay, well, there’s kubb throws and then there’s re-throws and penalty kubbs. And I do think that not capturing penalty kubbs is something you just — you have to capture a penalty kubb. That led to kind of a, you know, some debate that you and I did afterwards to figure out the best solution. And now I think we’ve got — I think we’ve got a really solid kind of notation system that follows the phases of the game. So we’ve got the throwing, the phase, the inkasting phase, and we’ve got the baton throwing phase, the kubb throwing phase and the baton throwing phase. And they each have shared grammar, but they also have the notation that allows you to record the differences in what happens in those phases.

Garrick: And any particular players against all of those things? And multiples if you need to.

Jamie: Yeah. And the great thing about the — I mean, the way that the notation works, you know, you can handle any number. I mean, technically if you had 10 people, 10 inkasters throwing in kubbs, you could record that, all 10 of them, if you wanted to. I don’t know if you can do that, but something tells me you could. But you can definitely have, like in world championships in Rome where everybody has to throw the kubbs in, then there’s no problem notating that. I’ve yet to find a thing that a baton can do that doesn’t get captured by the notation. So I think we have a bedrock for notation. And what’s so fun about that, and I think, for example, I’m gonna put this on the wiki soon, is just show, like, here’s how the notation can just be put into a text file if you just wanna, you know, keep your games around. Sure, you can put it on the Planet Kubb wiki and put in all these fields, but there’s also just, you know, hey, if you just want to store this locally on your computer, this is a great way to do that as well.

Garrick: And you’ve also done a great job of including what the regexes are on the computer side to be able to parse this.

Jamie: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I have a little Python too with a regex to parse it. And I’m gonna do one level deeper. I’m gonna parse not only the notation but then actually each action, and put that as example code so that people can, you know, if they want to write their own code to kind of turn the game into whatever, they

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: can do that. The notation I think at this point needs a little bit of time to rest. And then it needs a documentation phase that is pretty thorough. Like,

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: I think the documentation is okay, but it needs to be a discussion of, like, the grammar of the notation and a little bit better examples. But I think the notation is solid.

Garrick: I agree. I think both the notation and the score sheet, I’m very comfortable declaring as version one,

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: which means they are, until we learn about scenarios that these things don’t capture, it’s good.

Jamie: Yeah. The other thing is there could be any number of different score sheets, and

Garrick: Absolutely.

Jamie: so, you know, we had

Garrick: We didn’t have that beforehand, right?

Jamie: Exactly.

Garrick: And when we look at what the guys down in DMK were doing,

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: it wasn’t that far off.

Jamie: Right, I mean it’s very similar. Yeah. And, you know, I gotta say this, so, you know, I think one of the things that is right with the notation is that it ignores things that can be ignored. Like, I find it interesting that one of the things that people want to capture oftentimes is like, okay, well, you threw a baton, you hit a baseline. Which baseline?

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: And the Planet Kubb notation has no designation that just says you hit a baseline. And in reality, it doesn’t really matter.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: And in fact, it doesn’t matter when you hit fields. And it’s also just it’s just confusing, because there’s no way to — I mean, like, how do you identify, oh, the one second from the left, you know? I mean, there’s no way to actually — which actually isn’t — I want to name the baseline kubbs. I think they should all have names.

Garrick: They should all have names like Dave and Stephen, Janice.

Jamie: Well, I mean, like in chess you would say that, yeah,

Garrick: Yeah, I was just going to say, in chess, you know which rook it is.

Jamie: You’d say the king’s rook or the queen’s rook, and so like I want to be able to say just the name and say that everybody knows which kubb that is, and

Garrick: It only matters on the baseline, which is weird, right? As soon as that kubb is a field kubb, it’s not like he’s the king’s rook anymore.

Jamie: He’s just, yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s not special. Just a block of wood.

Garrick: Just a block of wood. Oh golly.

Jamie: So then we also have the score sheet, and the score sheet went through a revision after Nationals too. It’s solid.

Garrick: It is solid. It is so much better than what we walked into Nationals with.

Jamie: Yeah, and there may be at some point some electronic device that we use to capture games, but I’m telling you, I’m going to have a hard time finding something that’s faster than a clipboard with a couple of little clips and then a a pen. I mean, I could go really fast with that, yeah.

Garrick: Yeah. What I think is so fantastic about the score sheet is how humbly it started on that day that we talked about earlier at the park. I wrote essentially a printed out spreadsheet and said, okay guys, I got a score sheet. Let’s do this.

Jamie: And then I had to, like, do stuff.

Garrick: And then you had to do stuff, and you’re like three turns and you’re like, this is crap, this doesn’t work at all. So the biggest changes I think that came out of Nationals that you mentioned are our box for re-throws and a box for penalties. And then a little bit after that came, you know, based on some suggestions from the Ask Planet Kubb community, was some way to specify significance of advantage line.

Jamie: Right. Which was — I feel like that’s the last niggling thing, is exactly how to do that. People have tried to make a score sheet. That’s been tried, and every score sheet of course has to have a notation. I think one of the things that smartly was done here is that the notation actually preceded the score sheet. And a lot of times people just try, like, let’s make a score sheet and then figure out how to write in it. And instead they said, how do you notate a game, and then how would you make a score sheet that would accommodate that notation? And then the third thing that nobody’s done to my knowledge is actually create software that you could put that notation into and actually save it on the internet for others to see and generate information out of it. And that’s kind of the final piece that was super fun to put together. And is the most poorly developed thus far. But I mean,

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: yeah, that just

Garrick: Yep.

Jamie: There’s plenty of time to work on that.

Garrick: Right. And once you have the notation you can read through, as rough as those games are, there is some commonality between them, and the score sheet and the notation is consistent across that entire stream.

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: You can watch the game on the YouTube if you want to follow along.

Jamie: Yep.

Garrick: So it’s it’s very early for the game template stuff, but you know, if you know how to read these stats, and they’re not difficult, it’s

Jamie: It’s all there, and

Garrick: all there, right.

Jamie: the thing that I am working towards ultimately is I want to have a kubb player card. I want to have just like a baseball card. I want to have a picture of Josh Fetters, it says Dobby on it, says driller, and I want his critical stats. It’s the team he’s affiliated with. I want all that. I want it on a baseball card. Maybe someday we’ll print it on an actual baseball card.

Garrick: Right, right on. Hey, that’s what Moo.com is for.

Jamie: I don’t know. Exactly. And so when we get there, I mean, I think that is — I want to keep pushing on it, because I think that I can tell and you can tell and some others can tell that there’s a lot there, but it’s not immediately obvious. And I think that the more obvious that the richness of that information is, the more likelihood is that people will adopt the notation. And you

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: know, because it is a virtuous circle. You know, you’re not going to notate a game

Garrick: You’ve got — you’re starting to. You’re starting to build in some game state stuff into the wiki template that reads the notation.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: So we can, again, we’ve been talking this whole time about how from this very simple notation, very complex states of the game can be expressed, and very complex notions can be expressed, and stats can be sucked out of it.

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: just from a couple of numbers and letters. And one of the things that I found so enjoyable with the notation as it stands is you asked me to make up some fake games, some wrong games, some games that shouldn’t exist. And

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: being familiar with this notation, it was a joy, just wrote it out like, oh, and then this would happen, and this would happen, and this shouldn’t happen, so I’m going to write that down, and then this would happen, this would happen.

Jamie: You just wrote it out.

Garrick: Suddenly, wrong game.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: And you could just read it.

Garrick: You could just read it.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: And you could see like, yeah, that’s ridiculous. That would never happen.

Jamie: Well, I mean, I started realizing that even at the tournament, I started talking to people using the notation. And they had no idea. But I’d say like, oh, that’s a 4F.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: Now

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: yeah, it’s like, well no, it’s a quad, that’s what most people would say, but yeah, I’m gonna call it a 4F. Yeah, or like, you know, our own Kubbchucks, they got a 2FB.

Garrick: We did.

Jamie: Two fields colliding into a baton or into a baseline.

Garrick: Brilliant.

Jamie: Yeah. So I’m super excited, and I think everybody in the kubb community has been super receptive to it. I really hope that we can — I think that my objective for the rest of the season is we’re going to play some kubb, we’re going to have some fun. We’re going to continue to work on the notation and the score I think actually the score sheet’s done. I think the notation needs documentation. I’m going to continue working on the templates and really get it ready for next year. And with the objective being that we get some tournaments, like I’d really like to see some tournaments actually adopt the

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: Planet Kubb notation for maybe even just their final game, or maybe it’s the, you know, semifinals and finals. Yeah, but just adopt the notation as a way to kind of show the best of what happened at your tournament and

Garrick: Be able to communicate that to the worldwide community.

Jamie: then put that. Yeah. And I mean, if we can get it over the pond — and that’s already happening on Ask Planet Kubb, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got people overseas that are looking at this and really interested in it, so if we could get, you know — and that was actually one of the things, is that any musician in the world can look at a score of music and play it and understand what’s going on. And that’s what, you know, it doesn’t matter if I can speak the same language as this other team, I can see what they’re doing and I can know what their game is like.

Garrick: Yes. I wonder, you know, we had spent — because our games ran so long with the Engineers, I think, especially — there was a moment where we had a conversation with Eric about how do you determine where the tie should be broken, right?

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: And I think that the score sheet can help with that.

Jamie: Yeah, I think you’re right. It could. Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Rather than just looking at the number of baselines.

Garrick: More grain than just number of baselines. Oh, you’ve hit these doubles. You’ve got these number of baselines down.

Jamie: Right.

Garrick: You have, this team just has a slightly stronger game.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Yeah. Time’s out. They win.

Jamie: Yeah, I actually have been — so I’ve been going just inside my head, I’ve been thinking about points being assigned to certain actions, and then those points accumulate. And the problem is, I think that you could easily get to a position where a team would actually have more points but lose. And maybe that’s not a problem, but, you know, because you could argue, if you think of There would be an analogy to that in boxing. I mean, in boxing there’s a point for every throw, you know, every punch landed and all that. And you might still get knocked out. But if you don’t get knocked out, you would win. So that’s an interesting kind of parallel.

Garrick: A few months ago, I think before we started diving into the scores and the notation so far, I remember reading a post over on DMK from Dave about how to set up inkast kubbs more defensively.

Jamie: Right. Can I just say shout out to Josh Brothers Dave?

Garrick: Absolutely.

Jamie: He’s awesome.

Garrick: Great, great. Cool, great man. I mean, huge, really appreciate his support this past weekend. Great

Jamie: Yeah. Great guy.

Garrick: guy. And I remember reading that post and thinking, wow, you know, for such a seemingly simple act, there’s an entire world here.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: And that’s one of the things I like about the Kubb is everywhere you go, there’s an entire world.

Jamie: When I ripped that right open, then I went on Ask Planet Kubb and I said, hey, what if there was a one minute time limit to setting up kubbs? And oh, boy. Done. Oh, boy.

Garrick: Yeah. And if there’s another thing that I can say that I’m grateful for in the Kubb community, it’s there are very strong opinions and

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: they are not shy about sharing them.

Jamie: Absolutely.

Garrick: That’s terribly helpful.

Jamie: Yes.

Garrick: Okay, so we don’t go that direction.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: Totally fine, just wanted to know.

Jamie: Yeah. Yep. I honestly was a little surprised at the consistently negative reaction in my comment of, hey, how about if the finals game went five games, best of five? I

Garrick: Yeah, right.

Jamie: mean, nobody liked that. I mean, I just, like, universally panned, and I was like, well,

Garrick: But hey, now we have numbers against that and we know.

Jamie: Exactly. I didn’t think it was that bad of an idea. It’s like, well, we’ll just get into another game of great Kubb.

Garrick: Right.

Jamie: Now, I mean, granted, I mean, that does mean it could take seven hours, but yeah.

Garrick: Two equal, what was Jim saying? Two equally matched teams will play Kubb indefinitely.

Jamie: Yeah.

Garrick: I completely believe that.

Jamie: So we need to get a Kubb & Koffee on the schedule.

Garrick: Yes.

Jamie: And we need to invite a larger group of people to play Kubb. And hopefully the Tuesday Kubb friendlies will be resuming quickly. I assume there wasn’t one this week.

Garrick: I don’t know. Those guys are — I could assume, I don’t know. I just didn’t have the — yeah,

Jamie: I just couldn’t do it. Just didn’t have the brain power. And then we’re going to keep on kubbin’, as I say, kubbin'.

Garrick: I also want to put a big shout out before we head out to Aaron Elringer.

Jamie: Oh my god. Yeah, Aaron is awesome.

Garrick: Aaron is awesome. Yeah, great story, great Kubb player, just generous.

Jamie: You know, and you know what I’m going to say? I told a few people this because I had some questions about, hey, what was it like at this big tournament? And I’ve generally found that Kubb players are just a friendly group.

Garrick: Yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, by and large. I mean, not everybody, not to the person, you know, but, you know, particularly the competitive teams — actually, like, the competitive teams that have game, like, everybody was cool, right? I mean, and it was so fun to go there having now spent some more time with everybody online, and we had our Planet Kubb signs up and we had We had our Kubbchucks shirt on, and we’re getting random shout-outs for Kubbchucks, and it was just — I really felt like it was just a really warm welcome, and it reminded me a lot of when you go to like very century bike rides, where you’re going to go out and ride your bike for 100 miles. Everybody who’s going to ride their bike for 100 miles is — they’re just good people and they’re fun to talk to and

Garrick: Right. I think that’s — I would make that, you know, there’s a certain sort of bizarre behavior, subculture, random thing, and if you’re there, gonna do it, everyone’s gonna be like, hey, we got another one, of

Jamie: Exactly.

Garrick: course you’re gonna be friendly, right?

Jamie: Jump into the boat with us.

Garrick: It’s confirmation bias, yeah.

Jamie: Yeah, we’re here on the crazy island. Welcome.

Garrick: Welcome, welcome to the crazy island, glad you could join us today.

Jamie: This is Kubb fever. We got the fever too.