Summertime rings in with classic backyard games for fun for all ages

    Summer is here, which means it’s time to get outdoors, spend time with the family and bond over low-stakes backyard games like croquet, horseshoes and darts.
    Most lawn games have roots overseas and share origins with other, higher-level sports. Here’s the history of some of America’s most popular summer pastimes:
    
Croquet
    Croquet belongs to the “hitting things with a stick” family of lawn games, defined in opposition to the “throwing things at other things” family that includes horseshoes and lawn darts.
    Its rules come from the Western European games of jeu de mail and pall-mall. “Jeu de mail,” or “the game of the mallet,” was played in France for hundreds of years before the emergence of modern croquet, with various sources tracing its development back to the Middle Ages.
    Pall-mall was popular from the 16th through the 17th centuries, and consisted of hitting a boxwood ball through an iron hoop with a hammer. The name “pall-mall” comes from the Italian “pallamaglio,” which literally mean “ball mallet” (or “ball maul,” which would be a much better name for the current sport).
    While the English upper classes played pall-mall on courts of grass or levelled sand, commoners improvised with streets and alleyways.
    The first set of rules for croquet-as-such were published in 1856, by English toy-dealer Isaac Spratt. It kept the basic structure of pall-mall, but added multiple hoops, or “wickets,” as well as the “croquet stroke,” from which the sport takes its name.
    The game migrated from Britain to the former English colony of America, where it assumed the popular backyard variant that most enjoy today.
    There’s also an association variant of croquet, which is significantly more complex, if one is into that sort of thing.
    
Horseshoes
    The National Horseshoe Pitchers Association traces the development of horseshoes back to the ancient sport of discus throwing.
    Discus was a staple at the primitive Olympic Games, but it was a rich man’s sport. For those who couldn’t afford an appropriately heavy disc of metal, discarded horseshoes were used as a substitute.
    The horseshoes were bent into a donut shape and thrown at iron pegs hammered into the ground.
    Horseshoes was said to be popular in military encampments, particularly among cavalrymen. Reflecting on the outcome of the Revolutionary War, the Duke of Wellington said “the War was won by pitchers of horse hardware.”

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