In the dim days before the Wii, Xbox and online bingo, the only way to engage in competitive pursuits was by leaving the house. This exposed you to the perils of plagues and footpads, but also had a clear benefit, namely that games, like so many other things worth doing, tended to take place in pubs.

You’re still never far from a pub dartboard or pool table, but these are a shadow of the heaving universe of games that once filled the taverns of Britain. Long before pubs were swept by crazes for darts in the Twenties and pool in the Sixties, punters were donning their jerkins for sweaty sessions of knur and spell, nipsy, daddlums, billets and nine holes.

The nipsy yards have gone quiet, but there are plenty of pubs where you can find contests that have not yet made it into the Olympics. A good place to start looking is Played at the Pub, by Arthur Taylor (English Heritage, £14.99), which examines pub games with a mix of scholarship, photos and handy sets of rules, in case you feel like getting your local’s bat and trap team back into action.

Did you know that the game of dominoes was once notorious for causing lethal fights? Or that Aunt Sally, still big in Oxfordshire, originally involved beating a cockerel to death? Real quoits, it turns out, is not a twee deck game but a muscular business that in Victorian times was one of the most popular spectator sports.

There’s still maggot racing in Oldham, pub shooting in Devizes and ringing the bull in various places. Then there’s dwile flonking, a messy spectacle involving assault with beer-soaked cloths, which would be one of the great surviving traditions of olde England if it hadn’t been invented in a pub in Suffolk in 1966.

As with most things, the best way to get a feel for pub games is by having a go. Among the most accessible is skittles, still played in an infinity of local styles up and down the country, including at the delightful Shave Cross Inn near Bridport in Dorset, which has a thatched Grade II listed skittle alley, no less.

Shave Cross Inn, Shave Cross, Dorset (01308 868358).

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