TIDDLYWINKS
by Rick Tucker
1997
The original game of tiddlywinks was an adult craze in England, the United States, and Europe throughout the 1890s after its invention by Joseph Assheton Fincher of London. Fincher patented the game in 1888 and trademarked the name TIDDLEDY-WINKS in 1889. The game quickly fell into public domain, and a large number of variations on the basic game were marketed, including Tiddledy-Wink Tennis, Ten Pins, and Golf. Over 70 patents have been issued for tiddlywinks-style games since.
The current, preferred spelling among “winkers” is “Tiddlywinks,” as one word. Milton Bradley still uses the original spelling, “Tiddledy Winks,” without the hyphen, and many companies have dropped the “ed” but have made the one word into two, which does justice to the older terminology of, “to tiddle your wink” (pressing a large disk, the tiddle, onto a smaller disk, the wink, causing the wink to move–the large disc is now called a “squidger.”).
Tournament Tiddlywinks was organized at Cambridge University in England in 1955, although it had been played informally there as early as 1949. It developed slowly until Cambridge challenged Prince Philip to a match. Philip appointed a radio comedy group, the Goons, including Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, as his royal champions against Cambridge, and the great amount of publicity surrounding the 1958 match excited public interest in the game. The game became very popular in Britain, and in 1962 a team from Oxford toured the United States and defeated every team it faced, including one fielded by Harvard undergraduates. Winks really didn’t catch on in the U.S. until 1966-67 when NATwA, The North American Tiddlywinks Association, was founded and teams had formed at many colleges including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and Waterloo. Since NATwA’s inception, there have been 150 official tournaments, about 6000 tournament games, and a total of 500 North American winkers.
In 1972 a team from MIT made the first major U.S. excursion to England, winking’s mecca, and defeated Southampton for the World Teams Championship. The U.S. dominated world play until the 1990s.
RULES AND NOMENCLATURE
by Rick Tucker
Tournament Tiddlywinks is a game that requires both strategy and manual skill, differing greatly from “children’s” tiddlywinks. The children’s game involves merely flicking the winks into a cup (known as “potting”). Tournament Tiddlywinks uses two additional basic shots: the “squop” shot, the most important shot in winks, in which a player shoots his wink onto opposing winks, thus immobilizing them, and the approach shot, in which a wink is sent to a key position from which it can protect friendly squops, attack enemy piles, or set up a strategic area.
The game is played by pressing or flicking a wink with a squidger on a three-foot by six-foot felt mat. Games may be won by either getting all of one color into the cup (“potting out”), or by establishing more points, based on a time-limit point system. In tournament-level play the typical strategy is to gain control by squopping enemy winks rather than by focusing solely on potting one’s own winks.
IT’S NOT JUST SQUIDGERS AND SQUOPS
by Rick Tucker
Winks has a vocabulary and subculture all its own. At a tournament, you might overhear, “I can’t pot my nurdled wink, so I’ll piddle you free and you can boondock a red. But if Sunshine gromps the double, I’ll lunch a blue next time.” In English this translates to, “My wink is too close to the cup to pot it, so instead, I’ll gently shoot you out from under the pile and you can shoot an opponent’s red wink off the table. But if Sunshine captures two of our winks with only one of his, I’ll pot an opponent’s blue wink on my next turn.” (Sunshine, the nickname given a famous American winker–whose real name is not used–is an MIT graduate who plays with either hand, and on special occasions will hold a squidger in his feet and shoot winks.)
The name tiddlywinks probably comes from a British slang term for a pub, where people regularly play games. In most other languages, tiddlywinks is known as the Game of Fleas–for example, “jeu de puce” in French. This name comes from the idea that fleas tend to be hopping about all the time, just like winks into the cup in the game of tiddlywinks.
NATwA publishes an informal newsletter, “Newswink,” to keep winkers informed of recent events. NATwA maintains close ties with ETwA, the English Tiddlywinks Association, and ScotTwA, the Scottish Tiddlywinks Association.
Rick Tucker has been playing tiddlywinks for almost 40 years [in 2011], ever since his first day as a Freshman at MIT. Two-time National Pairs champion and a National Teams champion, he edited “Newswink,” the newsletter for winkers in North America, and he maintains the historical archives on tiddlywinks. He has hundreds of tiddlywinks sets, antique and modern.
For more information, visit www.tiddlywinks.org.
