Asphip - Spinning Top Boomerang Bowling

Asphip includes both the Asphip Looper and the Wandering Disks. Both are attempts to introduce objects with different physical properties into traditional ball sports.

Asphip Looper is something like giant tops - you know, those tops that you whip to keep spinning like the kind of tops you'd find a century or millennium ago, only they're special tops, that spin on their bottoms or, actually, tops. And instead of whips you use specially padded bats, and you play on something like a very large, one-sided shuffleboard. Just watch this video and will be both clear and vivid.

The Looper, of course, travels best on the specially smoothed surfaces of an Asphip Court. And, once you have an Asphip Court, you might as well also have a set of Wandering Disks and play a combination of shuffleboard and tic tac toe with pucks on wheels. Pucks on wheels!

It makes you think. What other wonderfully mechanical things do we have that we could have fun with, get involved with, get completely, physically engaged with, make sports out of? New kinds of balls and pucks with new properties that invite play. Not that easy. Not that small of an accomplishment, this Asphip thing. Something actually new. Something to get interested in, very, very interested in.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith