A few months ago while playing cornhole with friends during a party in my backyard, I was once again dealing with the fact that I was the only competitive cornholer there. My fellow “real cornholers” will back me up when I say I’m nothing special on the boards, but among “general population” my ability to put most of my bags on the board, and a couple in the hole, sets me off as a superstar — they can’t believe I’m not a pro! Nobody wants to play against me, and if they do, I’m forced to give them a huge head start, play with three bags, or throw left-handed — sometimes all three!
Simply put, cornhole is kinda hard — slick boards make it hard to keep bags on the board, and putting a 6″ bag in a 6″ hole from 27 feet away is an impressive feat that good players make look way easier than it its. It’s no fun for non baggers to get their butts kicked, and while it’s fun to be a big fish in a small pond, playing handicapped against non cornholers isn’t as fun as playing real cornhole unencumbered against other cornholers. People new to cornhole also struggle to figure out subtraction scoring. Hell, after a few drinks my buddies and I have to concentrate to add things up, figure out the difference, etc.
The Inspiration
As they were all lamenting why the game is so hard, I jokingly suggested I’d add more holes for them. They lit up, and an idea was born. I’d been struck with the idea for a cornhole-like game that would be easier, and therefore more fun, for more people! The idea quickly came in two phases:
- The first element of the idea was “Add more holes!” so people would experience the thrill of throwing bags in the hole more often.
- The second was “Simplify the scoring!” so people wouldn’t have to learn net/substraction scoring and do math every time they played.
I’d been building boards for years, so knew the dimensions of the board and hole well enough that I knew I could fit three holes across, and I could have run 4 rows down the board for a total of 12 which addressed the first goal in spades, but it hit me that a 3×3 configuration would enable us to play tic tac toe which crushed the second goal!
I ran to my computer, googled for hours to see if such a thing already existed, and was increasingly shocked to not find something similar if not identical. Closest thing was the old game “Toss Across” which is, frankly, totally different because there’s no skill involved — you throw bags at a grid, the symbols flip willy-nilly to X, O, or nothing, so there’s no strategy and it’s really only fun for little kids. It’s also a plastic table-top toy meant for little kids — nothing you’d remotely considering busting out at a BBQ, on the beach or during a tailgate party.
Building the Prototype
I grabbed my router and added eight more holes to an extra cornhole board I had laying around, making sure to keep the disks I cut out handy. I attached some “rails” to the bottom to keep the “pucks” from falling through the holes. Using some blue painters tape I added Xs to half of the pucks, and O’s to the other half. And voila — I’d invented a game!
It doesn’t work very well, honestly — the pucks get knocked out of place when bags land on the board, and they fall thru the holes half the time. It’s going to take some serious thinking and work to get it right, but just messing around with friends on the prototype is giving me confidence that it’s gonna be a super fun game.
Coming up with the Name
I’m a marketing guy by trade, and love coming up with brands, meaning names and logos, for pretty much every idea I have. I came up with a dozen possible names, every permutation of “tic tac toe” and “bag” and “throw” and “toss” you could think of, but very quickly settled on “Tic Bag Toe.”
I’m super excited to see what people think of my new game!