[PHOTO: Erik Isakson]
It’s spring, which means people are ultra-busy, particularly those with children. Wrangling together an entire foursome can prove challenging at this time of year. Cricket practice, Little Athletics, assorted nonsensical Halloween activities that seem to begin earlier and earlier each year, etc. These are all the things that pull people from the course on picture-perfect spring weekends.
For those of you who do soldier on (single people… mostly), you’re going to need some more games that are made for groups of three. Perhaps you’ve run Skins into the ground and you’ve already given 5-3-1 a few whirls. Enter “Defender”, which employs a 2 vs 1 situation the entire day when played properly.
Here’s how to play.
Number of players required: Can be played with four but works perfectly with three.
Best for: Wait for it… groups of three. Ham-and-eggers and players who do their best work alone. Aggressive and conservative players. Truly the best of all worlds.
How to play: You might notice some distinctly Wolf-y vibes from this game, but we’ll explain all the ways Defender differentiates itself. First off, decide the order that you will rotate throughout the round on the first tee. Let’s call it Player A–Player B–Player C. Player C goes last, making him the Defender on the first hole. Regardless of score, Player C would then go first on the second tee, Player A second and Player B third, making player B the Defender on that hole. Player B then goes first on the third, Player C goes second and Player A goes third, making player A the Defender on that hole. And so on and so forth. Each player will have an opportunity to be the Defender six times.
The Defender plays alone in a 1 vs 2 match, though unlike Wolf that is not by choice, and you also don’t ever choose who your teammate is as the two non-defenders. The object of the game as the Defender is to shoot the low score on the hole you are “defending”. If you are the low player as the Defender, you receive three (!) points, while the two players you beat each lose one point. If the Defender ties one of the other two players, the Defender receives 1.5 points while the other two players each lose 0.5 points. If the Defender makes the highest score in the group, the Defender loses three points while the other two players gain a point. This is another way Defender differentiates itself from Wolf. In Wolf, the losing side simply gets zero points. The constant addition and subtraction in Defender makes for plenty of jockeying on the leaderboard.
As is the case with many of these games, you can determine a winner – and payouts – however you’d like. You could do winner-takes-all for highest points scorer, or pay each other the difference in everyone’s point allotment with whatever dollar figure you came up with per point ahead of time.
Variations: For Defender, the one main variation is the scoring system. Instead of subtracting points from losing sides, you could just give three points to a winning Defender and zero to the two losing players. In the situation of a tie, the Defender just gets two points while the two losing players receive zero. In the situation of a loss for the Defender, the two winning players get one point each. Again, though, it’s way more fun when you subtract points. Maximum pain.
The other variation is for when you have four players. In this scenario, every player would get to be the Defender twice but there would be two leftover holes.
