- Standard carrom disks are black and white.checkers pieces image by Steve Johnson from Fotolia.com
A tabletop game played on a specially designed board, some people call carrom "finger pool," because of its similarities to billiards. As with billiards, each player tries to sink her pieces in sunken pockets located at the corners of the playing table. However, unlike billiards, carrom pieces look like disks rather than balls. - You start a game of carrom by holding a carrom piece in your closed hand. Your opponent must guess which hand you're holding it in. If he guesses correctly, he will play first. If he's wrong, you play first. The player going first always takes the white pieces.
To set up the carrom table, you place the queen--the only red disk--in the exact center of the table. Next, place a white disk touching the queen on the side of the board that faces the player who will play first. Complete a ring of disks around the queen, all touching the queen and touching each other, alternating black and white. Players begin an outer ring of carrom disks by placing a second white disk on the side of the board facing the player who will play first. This disk must touch the first white disk you placed on the board. Complete the second ring of disks, again alternating between white and black disks, with all disks touching each other and the inner ring of disks. - Your objective in carrom is to "pocket" all of your disks by hitting them into the corner pockets of the carrom board using the striker, a carrom disk larger and heavier than the rest of the disks. To begin play, place your striker within the baseline--a clearly-marked, disk-sized line running parallel to the edge of the board--on your side of the board.
On your turn, shoot your striker toward your color disks in an attempt to knock them into the corner pockets. You can either flick your striker with your fingers or hit it with a small pool cue, but you may not push your striker across the board. If you hit a disk into a pocket, you get to play again; otherwise, your opponent gets a turn.
The first player gets three chances to break up the opening array of disks before the turn passes to the second player. If you hit the striker into a pocket, take it and one disk of your color out of the pocket and replace them on the board. If you hit the striker and one of your disks into a pocket, take the striker and two of your disks out of the pocket and replace them on the board. - To win in carrom, you must cover the queen by striking the queen into a corner pocket before immediately striking one of your own pieces into a pocket. If you hit the queen into a pocket but do not hit one of your own pieces into a pocket on the play immediately after, you must return the queen to the center of the board.
- If you shoot all your disks into corner pockets before your opponent does, you win the game. To score the game, you need to count your opponent's disks left on the board; that number indicates your score. If you covered the queen, give yourself an additional three points. Each round has a maximum of 14 points, and the first player to earn 29 points wins the game.
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