View Single Post
Old 03-19-2005, 02:05 PM   #8 (permalink)
Pip
Likes Hats
 
Pip's Avatar
 
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
I've played curling a couple of times for fun in high school, this is what I remember of the rules.

The teams consist of four people with eight rocks, every player shoots two rocks per round. The teams take turns to shoot a rock each. The goal is to get your team's rocks as close to the middle of the target as possible and remove the opponent's.
At the end of the round, the team whose rock is closest to the middle gets the points, one point for every rock in the target area closer than the closest-to-the-middle rock of the opposing team I believe.
There's a lot of tactics involved in the placing of the rocks. You can place rocks as guards in front of the target area to stop the opponent or force them to take another way. A stone that has passed the back line or stopped before the "front" line is out of play and is removed from the field.
When you shoot a rock you slide along with it for a while and relese it before a certain line. You can twist it a little to make it curl, you can push it hard or loose, the sweepers can sweep or not, all that determines how the rock will travel. Two of your teammates may sweep the ice in front of the rock while the fourth stand on the sideline and shout stuff. (The shouting is a very important part of the gameplay experience!) Behind the middle line of the target area the opposing team may also sweep before the rock in hope of it exiting the playing field. The sweepers must never ever touch the rocks. The penalty is something awful that I have forgotten about because it was so terrible.

I never got the hang of sliding with the rock without a knee to the ice. The ice on a curling rink is very grainy in order to make the rocks slide better. Sliding on grainy ice leaning on a knee makes for some god-awful bruising though.
Pip is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73