Kubb: The Viking Lawn Game With a World Championship on Gotland

On the Swedish island of Gotland every August, hundreds of teams gather on mown grass to throw wooden sticks at other wooden sticks, and the last team standing is crowned world champion of kubb. It is the calmest, sunniest, most beer-friendly world championship I know, and I have made the trip across the Baltic to see it with my own eyes.

Kubb — pronounced roughly “koob” — is a Nordic lawn game, and the World Championship, the Kubb VM, has been held since 1995 in the village of Rone on Gotland’s southern half. That first year drew 28 teams, most of them local Gotlanders. It has grown into a genuinely international gathering since, hundreds of teams filling a field for a long August weekend, but it has kept the character of the first edition: relaxed, sunburnt, faintly ridiculous, and utterly charming.

I am a Copenhagen man by adoption and a lover of Nordic gatherings of every stripe, so a summer weekend of throwing wood on a Swedish island was an easy sell. Gotland in August is one of the loveliest places in the Baltic — limestone, poppies, medieval Visby up the coast — and the kubb crowd fits the setting perfectly.

The game, and why it grips you

The rules are simple enough to explain in a paragraph and deep enough to argue about for a decade. Each team lines up a row of five wooden blocks — the kubbs — along its baseline. In the middle of the pitch stands a larger block: the king. You throw six wooden batons underarm, trying to knock over your opponents’ baseline kubbs. Any kubb you knock down gets thrown back into the opponents’ half on their next turn and stood up where it lands, becoming a “field kubb” that must be cleared before you are allowed to attack the baseline again.

Here is the twist that makes kubb a real game and not just skittles: you must clear all the field kubbs before touching the baseline, and if you knock down a baseline kubb while field kubbs are still standing, your opponent gets to advance their throwing line closer. The whole thing becomes a rolling calculation of risk and position. And the king, in the centre, is sacred — knock the king over too early, before you have cleared every one of your opponent’s kubbs, and you lose instantly. You win by clearing the field, clearing the baseline, and only then toppling the king with your final throws.

That last rule is the soul of it. You can be one perfect throw from victory and still lose everything by rushing the king. It rewards patience, spatial thinking, and the nerve to hold your line. Watching the good teams play the Rone pitches, you see it is genuinely tactical — the placement of thrown-back kubbs, the geometry of a cluster, the decision of whether to go for glory or play the percentages. The underarm throw looks easy until you try to land a spinning baton flat against a four-inch block twenty feet away, over and over, in the wind off the Baltic.

The regulation pitch is 5 by 8 metres, the batons must be thrown underhand and spin end-over-end rather than helicoptering sideways, and the etiquette is taken seriously even when the beer is flowing. It is a game you can teach a child in five minutes and lose to that same child by evening.

The Viking chess that probably was not

Kubb is marketed, relentlessly and lovingly, as “Viking chess.” The legend says the game descends from the Vikings, played on Gotland since the age of longships and passed down unbroken through the centuries. It is a wonderful story. It is also almost certainly not true.

The honest history is thinner and, to me, more interesting. There is no solid evidence that kubb as we know it goes back to the Viking age at all. Skittle and block-throwing games of this general family show up in the ancient Mediterranean — versions were played in Egypt and Greece long before any Norseman lifted a baton — which suggests, if anything, that the idea migrated north into Scandinavia rather than springing from it. The modern game seems to have crystallised on Gotland in something close to its current form in the twentieth century, and the “Viking chess” branding is a marketing masterstroke layered on afterwards, giving a simple lawn game an epic pedigree it never earned.

I do not hold that against it. Half the traditions I love are dressed in borrowed history — a good origin myth is part of the fun, as long as somebody is honest about the seam between the story and the record. The Vikings did play games; Gotland was a Viking trading hub of real importance; the island is thick with genuine Norse history. It is entirely plausible that the ancestors of the people throwing batons in Rone today threw something similar a thousand years ago. Proof is another matter. The “Viking chess” tag is best enjoyed as flavour, the way you enjoy a good tale told well at a Danish Viking market, where the reenactors are meticulous and the folklore is generous and everybody knows exactly which is which.

A weekend in Rone

What I did not expect, coming to Gotland, was how much the Kubb VM feels like a small festival rather than a sporting event. Rone is a village, and for one weekend the field beside it fills with tents, families, dogs, cooler boxes, and the steady soft clatter of wood on wood from dozens of pitches at once. There is no roar, no floodlights, no headline set. There is sunshine, grass, the smell of grilled food, and hundreds of people happily absorbed in a game that costs almost nothing to play.

The atmosphere is amateur in the best sense of the word. Serious competitors turn up — there are teams who train, who take the tactics apart, who genuinely mean to win the thing — and they share the field with families who have driven over on the ferry for a laugh and a picnic. Both are welcome, both belong. The prize is glory and a nice trophy and the right to say you are, technically, a world champion. Nobody is getting rich. Everybody is having a good time.

That mix is what makes it worth the trip. I spend most of my year in loud, dark, sweaty rooms watching bands, and there is a particular pleasure in the opposite — a bright field, a gentle game, a beer warming in your hand, the quiet drama of whether a team twenty metres away will hold their nerve on the king. It scratches the same itch as the great absurd competitions of the Nordic world, the ones where an entire community agrees to take something delightfully minor completely seriously.

Getting there, and the island itself

Reaching Rone is part of the pleasure. Gotland sits well out in the Baltic, roughly halfway between the Swedish mainland and the coast of Latvia, and you get there by ferry from Nynäshamn or Oskarshamn, or by a short flight into Visby. The crossing sets the tone — a few hours of open water, the mainland dropping away, a sense of travelling to somewhere genuinely apart. Gotland is not a suburb of anywhere. It has its own weather, its own limestone geology, its own strange sea-stacks called raukar standing along the shore like petrified giants, and its own long, tangled history as a medieval trading power. Visby, the island’s walled town, is one of the best-preserved Hanseatic ports in the world, a UNESCO site of ruined churches and rose-covered lanes.

Drive south from there through farmland and pine and you reach Rone, and the kubb field. The contrast is lovely: a place this steeped in real history playing host to a game whose “Viking” history is largely invented. Nobody minds. The island wears its past lightly and its summers joyfully, and a weekend of baton-throwing on the grass fits right in among the poppies and the sheep and the long Baltic light that barely fades before midnight in August. If you make the trip, give yourself a day either side for Visby and the coast. The championship is the reason to come, but the island is the reward.

The Nordic art of the serious silly game

Kubb belongs to a family I keep coming back to in these dispatches: the Northern European tradition of the wonderful, deadpan competition. Sweden throws batons at a wooden king. Finland runs the Wife-Carrying World Championships at Sonkajärvi, where the prize is measured in the carried partner’s weight in beer. The Welsh will have you swim a peat bog in flippers for a world title. Each of these events takes a fundamentally silly premise and builds around it the full apparatus of championship sport — rules, referees, rankings, a trophy, a genuine will to win — and the sincerity is what makes them work.

Kubb sits at the gentlest, sunniest end of that family. Nobody gets hurt. Nothing catches fire. It is just wood, grass, geometry, and a summer weekend on a beautiful Baltic island. But the underlying spirit is identical: a community deciding that this small thing matters, that it is worth a championship, worth travelling for, worth taking seriously precisely because it does not need to be.

Go to Gotland in August if you ever get the chance. Learn the game in five minutes, spend the weekend losing it, and understand why a village of a few hundred souls somehow became the centre of the kubb-playing world. Just do not knock over the king too early. That is the one mistake the Vikings — real or imagined — would never forgive.