Curling is a team winter sport involving throwing polished granite rocks down a sheet of ice and onto a target.
Though it has elements similar to shuffleboard and bocce, the level of strategy involved makes many consider curling chess on ice.
Matches are played on a long rectangular sheet of ice by two teams of four players each. The goal is to accurately guide your stones down the ice towards a target area called the house. Points are scored for the number of stones that a team has closer to the center target than the closest of the other team's stones.
Objective:
Score more points than your opponent.
Game Play:
To shoot a rock: Use the FIRE button to select a power, this is shown by the green bar in the upper right hand corner.
Then select a direction, indicated by a red line extending from the current rock. Then choose a rotation, clockwise or counterclockwise indicated by the image beside the current rock.
To broom: Use the FIRE button to activate brooming. Brooming can be done up until the first collision with another rock.
Curling Basics:
The objective of curling is to score points by putting as many of your own rocks as close to the center of the scoring circle.
A standard curling game has 8 rocks to throw per end and 10 ends per game. Each team throws it rocks until there are no more and then scoring takes place. The rink is cleared and a new end is started.
Curling rock dynamics:
The rock will "curl" down the ice depending on the rotation that you picked. A clockwise rotation will cause the rock to "curl" to the right, and a counterclockwise rotation will go to the left. When the rock is thrown the only way to modify the trajectory is through brooming. The broom will make the rotation effect less and decrease the effect of friction.
Scoring:
The closest rock to the center will score one point. Then additional points are scored by tallying the number of rocks of that color starting from the closest rock out towards the perimeter of the circle. When a rock of the opposite color is found, the scoring ends. Therefore in order to score of 3 there must be 3 rocks closer to the center of the circle than of the other color.
Hammer:
The hammer indicates what team will get the last shot. The hammer changes side to the team who didn't score last round.
