Croquet is the great lawn game of patience and mischief: a walking-pace contest of aiming, plotting and gleeful sabotage that suits everyone from four to ninety, which is why it has never gone away.
Croquet at a glance
Players: 2-6 · Ages: 4+ (with adaptations) · Time: 30-60 minutes · You need: mallets, balls, 6 hoops, a peg, a lawn
Be the first to knock your ball through all six hoops in order and hit the centre peg. 1. Take turns, one stroke each. 2. Knock your ball through the next hoop in sequence to earn a bonus stroke. 3. Hit another player's ball (a roquet) to earn two bonus strokes. 4. Use those strokes to make progress or to send your opponents somewhere inconvenient. 5. First to finish all hoops and strike the peg wins.
You do not need a bowling green: any reasonably flat stretch of garden will do, and a few bumps add character. Set out the six hoops in two rows of three, one row down each side of the lawn, with the peg planted in the centre. Play up one side (hoops 1, 2 and 3), across the top, then down the other (hoops 4, 5 and 6), finishing at the peg. Walk the course before you start: which-hoop-is-next is the oldest argument in croquet.
The balls are traditionally blue, red, black and yellow, played in that order, with blue and black partnering against red and yellow. Two players take two balls each; four take one each in fixed pairs; five or six play in teams and share balls. Each ball starts a mallet's length in front of the first hoop.
A turn is one stroke: stand square, swing the mallet between your feet like a pendulum, and strike the ball with the face of the mallet head. Then play passes to the next ball in colour order, unless you have earned a bonus stroke. There are exactly two ways to do that:
A skilled player chains these: roquet, croquet stroke to set up the hoop, run the hoop, earn another stroke, and so on. Long turns are how the game is won.
This is the bit everyone gets wrong, so here it is in plain words. A roquet is simply hitting another ball with yours. Once you have done it, pick up your own ball and place it on the grass touching the ball you hit. Then play the croquet stroke: strike your own ball, and only your own ball, and because the two are touching, both move. You never hit the other player's ball directly, and the old habit of pinning your own ball under your foot is a relic best retired: feet off, both balls free to travel.
The croquet stroke is where the tactics live. Strike gently and both balls trickle forward together. Strike at an angle and you can send the enemy ball into the rose bed while yours sits politely in front of its hoop. You then still have one continuation stroke: use the croquet stroke to arrange the furniture, the continuation stroke to make progress.
One restriction keeps it fair: you may roquet each ball only once per turn. Running your next hoop resets the count, and you may roquet them all again. So the engine of a long turn is hoop, roquet, croquet, hoop, roquet, croquet, until something goes wrong, which it reliably does.
Once a ball has run all six hoops in order it becomes a rover, and its final task is to strike the centre peg. Hit the peg and that ball is finished and leaves the lawn. In singles, the first to peg out both balls wins; in team play, the first side to get all its balls home takes the match. A rover not yet pegged out stays in play and can still roquet, rescue a partner, or generally make a nuisance of itself.
This page can claim something few rulebooks can: these are the rules of croquet as set down by the company that created the modern game. Jaques of London invented modern croquet. John Jaques II manufactured the first sets and codified the rules in 1851, and from the era of the Great Exhibition onward he popularised the game across Britain's lawns, from which it spread around the world. The company has made croquet sets continuously ever since. When families argue about the croquet stroke, this is the source they are arguing back to.
Croquet is an aiming game first: lining up a ball, judging weight of stroke, adjusting after a miss. It is also a genuine exercise in patience and inhibitory control: turns waited for, tempting smashes resisted, the long plan held in mind while the short term goes wrong. Tactics arrive naturally. A six-year-old who discovers, unprompted, that hitting Grandpa's ball earns extra shots has just invented strategy on her own.
Best of all, croquet is played at walking pace, which means at everyone's pace. Four generations can share one lawn and one game without anyone being humoured, a rarity explored in our guides to garden games for families and why real play matters.
Honestly: full croquet suits about age six upward. But the swinging and the satisfying clack of mallet on ball delight children from around four, so adapt rather than exclude:
As for letting them win: rig the course generously at four, ease off by six, play it straight by eight. Children can smell a thrown game long before they can run hoop five.
A proper croquet set is a pleasure to handle: the weight of a wooden mallet, the heft of a full-size ball, hoops in a neat row on the grass. Since Jaques made the very first sets in 1851 and has never stopped, a Jaques croquet set is as close as a garden game gets to buying from the source.
From about four with the adaptations above: a two-hoop course, shared mallet, an adult on their team. From six or seven most children can manage the full hoop sequence, and by nine they will be roqueting you off the lawn without mercy.
No. That is an old variant that refuses to die. Place the two balls touching and strike only your own ball so that both move. It is more skilful, fairer, and kinder to your toes.
You never accumulate a pile of them. Running a hoop gives one bonus stroke; a roquet gives two, the croquet stroke then a continuation. Long turns come from chaining these one link at a time, not from banking shots.
Nothing at all. The peg only matters to a rover, a ball that has run all six hoops. Until then it is merely an obstacle, and bouncing off it is one of croquet's small embarrassments.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.