So I started a plain old Cocoa project to develop it as a desktop game with the plan to adapt it to the iPhone when the time came.Īnd here it is, the real thing. To me it seemed like a natural fit for the iPhone's Touch interface. The fans included important figures of the business, theatrical, and political worlds.'Ībout a year ago, when the notion of writing apps for the iPhone looked like it would be a possibility someday, I decided that a great app to write would be an implementation of Shufflepuck, the bar room game where you slide pucks/weights down the table to the other end. The fans faithfully followed the players to tournaments in New York City Newark, Paterson, Hoboken, Jersey City and Bloomfield, New Jersey, and even into Philadelphia. Highly publicized tournaments played by such colorful characters as 'Big Ed' Morris, Dave Wiley, Alex Scott, Ed Gardland, and George Lavender drew hordes of fans. The judge ruled thus: 'Though the defendant kept a public gaming table, as charged, and though diverse persons played there at and bet spirituous liquors on the game, the game was not a game of chance, but was altogether a game of skill.' The game shed its crude beginnings when American cabinetmakers such as Hepplewhite and Duncan Phyfe turned out some of their finest inlaid cabinet work on shuffleboard game tables for the wealthy homes of New York City.īy 1897, table shuffleboard rated as much space in the metropolitan newspapers in the New York City area as prizefighting and baseball. John Bishop' to decide the question, 'Is shuffleboard a game of chance or a game of skill?' came up for trial. 'In 1848, in New Hanover, Pennsylvania, a case of 'The State vs.

The Wikipedia entry on Shuffeboard (also known as 'Shufflepuck') is a good read.

Shufflepuck board