Blink have just launched a really great sounding Bluetooth game, based on the traditional English game of Conkers.

If you just went “WTF?”, Conkers has its own entry in Wikipedia, that sound suspiciously like something Douglas Adams made up. But here are the rules of the original game:

1. Take a large, hard conker [Horse Chestnut] and drill a hole through it using a nail, gimlet, or small screwdriver. (This may be done by an adult on behalf of the contestant.) Thread a piece of string through it about 25 cm long. Often a shoelace is used. Tie a large knot at one or both ends of the string, so that the conker will not slide off when swung hard.
2. Find an opponent. It is to your advantage if you can find an opponent with a conker smaller and softer than yours.
3. Take it in turns to hit each other’s conker using your own. To do this one player lets the conker dangle on the full length of the string while the other player hits. To hit, hold the string in one hand with the conker held above it in the other hand, then swipe at the opponent’s conker, letting go of your own nut but keeping hold of the string

The winner is the player with the in-tact conker at the end and there’s a complex scoring system, which makes cricket look simple.

Fast forward to today and you can now play conkers on your phone over Bluetooth. You tie your phone to a shoelace and hold it up…..

Seriously, players connect over Bluetooth to bash each other’s conker in the virtual fashion.

In the original game, there was what could easily be the first variant of the “cheat” which has become so prevalent in gaming. Players would do things like bake their conker in an oven or varnish it to achieve a harder, more destructive and indestructible conker. So it’s nice to see this carried over into the virtual game too - you can undertake the equivalent of baking your virtual conker by powering it up by connecting with Bluetooth to other mobile phones.

What a damn fine idea.

A further nice piece of news is that Blink will make the code open source shortly, so others can create new variants of Bluetooth, short range gaming. It could bring a whole new lease of life to the good old British Pub.

Image from the One Brand Group.