Everything you need to set up a fair, joyful game of two-team skittles in the garden, from pin formation to toddler-friendly adaptations that keep every age in the game.
Two-team skittles can be explained in a single sentence: divide your players into two groups, take turns rolling a ball at nine or ten pins from an agreed distance, add up the pins knocked down after each round, and the team with the highest total after an equal number of turns wins. That simplicity is precisely its strength. It requires no reading, no complex strategy and no expensive equipment, which makes it one of the few genuinely inclusive garden games that a two-year-old and a grandparent can play together in the same afternoon without either feeling sidelined.
The rules can be as light or as structured as your group needs. In their most classic British form, each player bowls twice per turn, scoring the total pins felled across both rolls. Teams alternate turns throughout each round. A match typically runs to five or seven rounds, with a tally kept on paper or a chalkboard. For very young children, the distance shrinks, the competitive element softens and the whole thing tips naturally into collaborative celebration. More on all of that below.
Traditional English skittles uses nine pins arranged in a diamond: one pin at the front, two behind it, three across the middle, two again and one at the back. Some sets use ten pins in a triangular formation borrowed from bowling. Either works well for team play. What matters most is consistency: whichever arrangement you choose, reset it identically after every turn so that no team benefits from a stray pin placement.
For adults and older children, a bowling distance of roughly four to five metres gives a satisfying challenge without becoming frustrating. For children aged three to five, bring the line in to two metres, or even one and a half. Mark it clearly with a length of rope, a chalk line on paving, or a garden cane laid flat across the grass. A smooth, level surface is ideal, but a gentle lawn adds delightful unpredictability that younger children particularly enjoy.
You need a corridor of roughly two metres wide and six metres long for a comfortable adult game, meaning almost any garden with a clear strip of grass or patio will do. If space is tighter, simply reduce the distance and remind players that a slower, more deliberate roll often outperforms a forceful one.
Browse the Jaques London skittles collection, crafted to the same exacting standards the company has upheld since 1795.Decide which team bowls first by any method the children find exciting: a coin toss, a quick game of rock-paper-scissors, or awarding the honour to whoever last had a birthday. Within each team, players bowl in a fixed rotation so that everyone knows when their moment is coming. Each player takes two rolls per turn. After both rolls, count the pins down and record the score before resetting.
Once every member of Team One has bowled, Team Two takes its full set of turns. That completes one round. A standard match runs to five rounds, giving every player five turns and producing a final score large enough that a single lucky strike does not decide everything on its own. Seven rounds suits older children and adults who want a longer, more strategic contest.
Appoint a scorer, ideally a child who enjoys writing or tallying. Keeping score is itself a worthwhile task: it teaches simple addition, gives a child a sense of responsibility and keeps them engaged during the other team's turns.
Classic scoring: each pin felled counts as one point. A player who knocks down seven pins with their first roll and two with their second scores nine. Totals are summed within the team. The team with more points at the end of all rounds wins.
Simplified scoring for mixed-age groups: count only full clearances, meaning a turn in which all pins are knocked down across the two rolls. Each clearance scores one point. This reduces arithmetic stress and keeps younger scorers accurate, though it does reward bold bowling over careful placement.
Tiebreaker: if totals are level after the final round, each team nominates one player for a single-roll decider from the standard adult distance. The player who knocks down more pins wins it for their team. If that too is tied, declare a shared victory with equal ceremony for both sides.
Why shared victories matter more than you might think
Alison Gopnik's research on early childhood learning emphasises that young children absorb social and emotional frameworks from the adults around them. When grown-ups model gracious joint celebration rather than treating every tie as a failure of competition, children internalise that cooperation and contest can comfortably coexist.
For children under three, remove team competition entirely and simply celebrate every pin that falls. From around three years old, a child can begin to understand the concept of teams without becoming distressed by the outcome, provided adults frame winning and losing lightly. Place the throwing line at one metre, allow the child to crouch or kneel, and accept that some children will prefer to carry the ball and place it gently against the pins. That is a perfectly valid technique and produces enormous satisfaction.
In cooperative skittles, both teams work toward a shared total target: can we all knock down one hundred pins before lunch? Every player contributes to the same number regardless of team, and the shared goal replaces rivalry with collective effort. This format is especially useful when age gaps are wide or when one child is noticeably stronger than the others.
For very young children, larger pins spaced slightly apart are easier targets than a tightly packed formation. A wooden ball of around eight to ten centimetres diameter sits comfortably in a toddler's palm without requiring a grip that strains small wrists.
Skittles looks like simple knockabout fun, and it is, but the developmental work happening beneath the surface is substantial. Rolling a ball accurately requires children to integrate hand-eye coordination, spatial reasoning and controlled force: a genuine physical challenge that improves with practice in ways a child can feel and measure for themselves.
Play as the engine of development
Researchers Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, whose work on playful learning has influenced early years practice across many countries, argue that games with gentle structure, clear goals and immediate physical feedback provide exactly the conditions in which young children consolidate new motor and cognitive skills most efficiently. Skittles, with its visible and satisfying outcome on every roll, fits that description well.
Team play adds a further layer. Waiting for a turn, cheering a teammate, accepting a disappointing outcome and continuing to play regardless are social-emotional skills that Vygotsky described as being built most durably through shared, goal-directed activity with others. A garden skittles match, however informal, provides exactly that scaffolding.
Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's longitudinal observations of play materials consistently found that open-ended physical toys, those that respond directly to a child's own skill level rather than generating outcomes independently, produced the richest developmental engagement. A set of wooden skittles is as open-ended as play equipment gets.
A skittles party works best when teams are deliberately mixed by age rather than self-selected, so that older children and adults naturally support younger ones. Assign each team a colour, make simple sashes or wristbands from ribbon, and give teams a few minutes to agree on a name before play begins. That small ritual of collective identity transforms a knockabout session into an occasion.
Run two or three shorter matches rather than one long one, reshuffling teams between matches. This ensures that children who ended up on the losing side in match one have an immediate opportunity for a fresh start, which is far kinder to young emotions than a single definitive result. Between matches, offer a non-competitive free-bowl period where children bowl at any distance they choose. This relieves pressure and lets less confident players experiment without an audience.
Explore the full Jaques London outdoor games range for more garden classics suited to every age and occasion.The garden as classroom
Richard Louv, whose writing on children's relationship with the natural world has shaped outdoor education policy in several countries, notes that unstructured and lightly structured outdoor play together offer distinct and complementary benefits. A garden party that moves between organised team skittles and free exploration gives children both in a single afternoon.
Most children from around three years old can follow a simple turn-taking structure and understand that they belong to a named group, which is really all two-team skittles requires at that age. Scoring, distance and competitive framing can be introduced gradually over the following year or two as attention span and emotional resilience grow. There is no harm in a two-year-old playing alongside older children in a team, provided adults keep expectations gentle and celebrate every roll regardless of outcome.
Two players per team, so four in total, is a perfectly workable minimum. Each player simply bowls more often within each round. Six to eight players across two teams produces a livelier atmosphere and longer intervals between turns, which can suit older children but may test a toddler's patience. For groups of ten or more, consider running two parallel lanes simultaneously to keep everyone active and reduce waiting time.
This is entirely normal and worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Young children do not yet have the emotional regulation to separate their sense of self-worth from an immediate outcome. The most useful response is to reframe the narrative during play, not just at the end: celebrate good rolls regardless of which team makes them, focus commentary on effort and technique rather than the score, and avoid dwelling on the final result. Switching to the cooperative total-target format for a few sessions, then reintroducing gentle competition once the child feels more confident, is a gradual approach that many families find effective.
Well-made wooden skittles are among the safest garden toys available for young children, provided the finish is non-toxic and the pins have no sharp edges or small detachable parts. For toddlers, look for pins substantial enough not to feel fragile when handled, and a ball with a diameter of at least eight centimetres so that it cannot pose a choking risk and sits naturally in small hands. Jaques London has made wooden play equipment to consistent quality standards for over two centuries, making their skittles sets a reliable choice for families with children of all ages.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.