Horseshoes and hand grenades

Legal Disclaimer: No innocent horses were harmed in the creation of this excessively-violent blood sport. There, ya happy, now?

Horseshoes and hand grenades is a professional lawn-based throwing sport where pin-point accuracy is occasionally rewarded, but not overly emphasized. The game, invented sometime last month, is currently gaining great popularity with teenagers and other people suffering from low self-esteem.

History

Prehistory

The long and sordid prehistory of horseshoes and hand grenades begins with the immediate predecessor of the game: Tiddly-winks and shotguns. Prehistoric Boy often competed with himself, and occasionally other prehistoric boys, in hurtling tiny plastic disks at randomly-chosen targets and subsequently blasting them full of holes, and wagering heavily on the outcome. Needless to say, this newly invented past-time got old real quick. It wasn't before the invention of portable explosives and affordable footware for horses that anybody could do anything about this unfortunate state of affairs. And thus Prehistoric Boy went extinct got bored and found something else to do with his spare time, without ever knowing the unbridled joy of getting to first base... errrr, playing a real man's game.

Horseshoes

In 1873, soon after the domestication of the domesticated horse, the first horseshoe was born. Old western videotapes of the old American West thoroughly documented the legendary exploits of the legendary horseshoe slingers, where the best of them could, with an elegant flick of the wrist, zing a ringer around the necks of their bitter opposition from a distance of twenty paces, causing instant strangulation and thereby scoring a three-pointer. Kinda' like basketball or something. Needless to say, having a five-pound piece of forged steel suddenly wrapped tightly about your windpipe is not particularly pleasant, but they made the best of what little they had, regardless.

Hand grenades

In 1914, soon after the outbreak of real warfare for a change, the first hand grenade was born. Old French photography of war-torn Quebec thoroughly documented how bad war could truly get. It was quickly determined by French soldiers that the humble hand grenade, with a blast radius of five to fifteen feet, could do substantially more collateral damage than the heaviest regulation horseshoe, and it didn't even have to be spot-on; whereupon the French Armée de Terre sold their remaining horses through eBay, stocked up on hand grenades, and actually won their first war ever (by default). This historical event is celebrated by screaming French kids around the world to this day, every November 11, at precisely 11:11:11 AM, by tossing numerous toy hand grenades into a freshly-excavated tranchée chock-full of terrified German kids. All in good fun, of course.

Sometime last month

Sometime last month, soon after the outbreak of the Great Uncyclopedia Flame War, an anonymous inventor of strange and useless ideas had one of those "You Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter!" epiphanies. In spite of the fact that subsequent internet research has uncovered convincing evidence of "This kind of thing has been done already", the aforesaid inventor simply ignored the tell-tale warning signs, and managed to procure several sets of second-hand horseshoes, a barley-stuffed scarecrow, and a box of Army-surplus ordinance from the local stable-boy, all for a reasonable amount of unmarked currency and services performed which shall not be referenced hitherto. After untold days of carefully-controlled experiments adjudicating between distance, angle of attack, projectile ratios, scorched-earth tactics, and scoring methodologies, the game at last was ready to be patented and sold to Toys-R-Us for marketing to impressionable children everywhere.

During a protracted game of Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, your backyard may resemble something like a scene from Armageddon: Revenge of The Lord. Try not to panic; it won't help matters.

Rules of the game

Horseshoes and hand grenades is a strange sport, yet easy to comprehend. Kinda' like curling with explosives. The rules are quite simple. It's the damnable scoring scheme that requires a master's degree in advanced vector calculus; but this can be adequately handled with a cellphone.

Standard equipment (for three to ten players)

• 1 scarecrow
• 36 horseshoes
• 800 to 1,000 hand grenades
• 1 freshly-mowed lawn (minimum 150 feet in radius)
• 1 tape measure
• 1 naval sextant
• 1 freshly-charged fire extinguisher
• 1 freshly-charged cellphone
• adequate supply of paint in an assortment of eye-pleasing pastel colors (not included in box)

Set-up and game-play

At a spot approximately in the middle of the lawn, plant the scarecrow firmly in the ground (standing upside-up). Divide the remaining game pieces as evenly as possible amongst the participating players, and retain the left-overs for your own personal and private utilization. Each player shall choose their favorite color of paint to mark their equipment. At a predetermined time, from a comparatively safe distance of (at least) 100 feet all around, everybody hurls for all their worth everything they got in any order they choose at the unfortunate scarecrow.

After the resulting inferno has been adequately dealt with, and the smoke clears, and all injured parties are emergency-airlifted to the local hospital, measure the distance and angular displacement and color of each reasonably-intact horseshoe from the epicenter of the lawn and enter the coordinates into your cellphone and upload the data to toys-r-us/horseshoesandhandgrenades.com for a cost-free analysis. After three business days, the official results should arrive by email. Whichever of the surviving players is closest in points to the mathematical average of all points scored is declared the winner of that round.

Computer version

For those who are unwilling to spend a great deal for the official lawn-top version of Horseshoes and Hand Grenades^®, Toys-R-Us has made a low-cost desktop app available, rendered in classic text-adventure style. Needless to say, it's not nearly as exciting as the real thing.