WINTER GAMES.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 143647, 15 November 1911, Page 7

WINTER GAMES.

Aro wo threatened with a revival of ping-pong, which ono had thought to be as dead as last year's snows? It is said to be possible. A manager at one of tho big stores in London told a Standard reporter the other day, apropos of indoor winter games, that ping-pong had never quite died out in tho suburbs, and he looked forward to a revival of tho game. Its decline is attributed largely to tho fatigue involved in picking halls up from the floor, but this firm has invented a claw arrangement on tho end of a walking-stick, by which the balls can easily bo retrieved without stooping. There is also the potent fact that hots of ping-pong were recently ordered for two op tho itoyal residences. In the meantime there are a surprisingly largo number of people trying to invent games that will be as popular as ping-pong was. This ono establishment has'ahout a hundred new winter games offered to it in the course of a year, and accepts perhaps a dozen. Among many inventors, tho firm has dealt with a bishop’s wife, a naval officer, clergymen, a fashionable woman of title, a pawnbroker’s assistant, and a bathchairman. Profits on these ideas vary. Generally payment is a small amount to cover cost of model-making and a 10 per cent, royalty on sales. There is a popular race game, something like roulette, which is still bringing its inventors, two city clerks, over £6OO a year in royalties, and they must have realised quite a fortune uy the sale of foreign rights. This winter’s novelties at Homo include tho game of “Boy Scouts,” invented by an officer of tho army, and “Aerito,” an aerial race game. Tho life of most games is very short. Tho drawing-room takes them for a while, and then they aro relegated to the schoolroom. For six weeks everybody was playing “Pigs in Clover,” but the craze suddenly “flashed out.” Now card games seldom last more than one winter. People stick to the old games, and always will do so ; the new games are only temporary diversions. According to this authority the finest hrii+ge players in the world are Scotsmen. It may surprise some people, but why should the Scot bo denied supremacy in ono thing He leads in cverytlwig else, so to make his superiority symmetrical ho should lead in bridge.