What is all this nonsense about ELITE and Standard Crokinole boards?

What is the difference between Standard and ELITE?

With the launch of our 2025/26 Kickstarter project for Crokinole we are offering Standard and ELITE boards for the first time, so what is that all about?  Let's go into the nitty gritty and see!

Our standard boards have been all we have ever done since our first project in 2013.  We have produced over 15,000 of these boards over 8 prior Kickstarter projects dating back 12+ years and everyone has been very happy with them.  We are on our 5th factory making these and we believe the factory we are using to be the most responsive and the best we have ever used and plan to use the into the future.

This is our history of Crokinole Boards on Kickstarter, you can see we have been offering Standard Tournament Boards for a long time!

So what are the ELITE boards?

In mid-2024 I was referred to an amazingly high-end furniture factory that does some of the most well known pool tables and top furniture brands in the world.  I was blown away by their quality and wanted to see just how far we could push the idea of a truly ELITE board.  Rather than give them one of our standard boards we gave them a couple of what are regarded as the highest quality, hand-made boards out there.  We challenged them to reproduce this quality and spare no detail.  The amazing news is that they largely achieved that, but the price was significantly higher what we were paying at the standard factory.  But the quality was so much better!  We decided to offer our 2024 campaign backers (5700+ of them) the chance to upgrade to an ELITE board that we had never done before and about half of them decided to do just that.  They paid more but got more and everyone seemed happy so we are offering these ELITE boards up front for the first time ever here on this campaign!  Enough of the lore, here are the key differences:

• The standard board is made of an outer ring (think of a narrow donut) with an inner circle sitting on top of it. This means its "ditch" around the edge is the thickness of the inner circle and there is an inner underside where we have put eyelets to hang the board.  The center 20-piece is a "plug" that sits in the middle of the board. 

• The ELITE boards are made the same way the most reputable custom boards are made, with a solid piece of MDF all along the bottom and an additional piece mounted on top of it.  The result is a much heavier, more solid and sturdier board.  They have three rubber feet that are 1/4 inch tall to keep it off your table all together and self level in the event your table isn't perfectly flat/level.  This results in a much heavier board, coming in around 14 KG vs the 8 KG of a standard board.

• The rim of the Standard board is much thicker and the wood it is made out of is stapled onto the board and itself to hold it in place.  Generally this is fine but it isn't a "superior" build in that sense.  In contrast the ELITE board's rim is thinner but more sturdy consisting of higher quality plywood that is glued together and not affixed at just one point.  The feel is much more premium and the quality of the bond/joints is just better overall.

• The pegs on the ELITE are rubber on metal screws while the standard board has wooden pegs.  Both are fine but the ELITE pegs require more expense and installation labor.  You can buy rubber/screw adaptor kits for your Standard board for about $10 though (as an add-on during the survey process).

• In the photo above you can see the standard board has a convex middle 20s hole making pulling out discs by pushing on one side easy.  The ELITE board on the right has a 20s hole that isn't as deep and is flat on the bottom.  Making 20s is a bit more difficult on an ELITE board and taking them out of the hole can be a bit challenging with bigger fingers, though you can easily buy a small plastic convex piece to put in there if you want (Browncastle and other shops sell them).  

From our inspections the playing surface is also more "Hard and smooth" on the ELITE boards but if you wax any board and discs regularly you will find that they all play the same, that is how you can have boards made of any wood or glass or even acrylic or metal and still have them glide smoothly, the wax is all that really matters in the end.

So in the end the main reason why the ELITE boards cost more is that they take more material, more labor and a higher attention to detail than the standard boards.  In the end the real answer is that the ELITE boards cost us a lot more than the standard so we have to charge more.