quoit

“Let’s see...earlier I was eating ice cream. Right now I’m tossing this quoit ring.”

In the 14th century, quoits, a game in which a metal disc is aimed at a wooden peg was considered so diverting that King Richard II banned the general public from playing it.

They used to play quoits in the road with four big steel washers they’d found in a hardware store but these were gone with everything else.

The Harvard psychologist Jerome Frank asked people to play a game of quoits—you throw rings onto a stick, as in an amusement-park test of skill.

There were games of deck quoits and bridge.