Roll & precision games

Note the range: Molkky to full croquet is a nineteen-fold difference in area. These are not interchangeable purchases, and “lawn game” as a category tells you almost nothing about whether a set will fit.

Bocce and croquet both resize honestly, which is worth knowing. The USCA explicitly allows adjusting the nine-wicket court to the space available, and backyard bocce is routinely played on a strip about 60 by 12 feet rather than the federation's 86.92 by 13.12. Kubb does not resize as gracefully: the throwing distances are the game, and shortening the pitch changes what a baton throw is worth.

Bocce — the one everyone can play in ten seconds

Roll a small target ball, then roll your balls closer to it than the other team. That's the whole explanation. It works on grass, sand, gravel and dirt, it scales from two to four players, and the only real decision is ball size: 107 mm is the tournament diameter, 90 mm is the one a child can actually roll accurately. See best bocce ball sets.

Kubb — the crowd game

Throw batons underhand to knock over your opponent's blocks, then fell the king. The Kubb World Championship publishes every piece dimension, and the published player range of 2 to 12 makes it the only game we cover that genuinely absorbs a party. It needs 430 square feet, which is the price of that. See kubb sets.

Croquet — the one that needs a lawn, not a yard

Nine wickets, two stakes, up to six players, and the largest published footprint on this site. The USCA does allow you to shrink the court, and a shrunk court is a real game — but below about 40 feet the wickets stop being a challenge. See croquet sets.

Molkky — the one with the best scoring rule

Knock over numbered pins to reach exactly 50. Go over and you drop back to 25. That rule turns a comfortable lead into a genuinely awkward position, and it is the reason Molkky stays tense to the end more reliably than anything else here. See Molkky sets.

• Mixed ages — this family is the backbone of that list, and 90 mm bocce is its single best pick.
• Large groups — kubb, and after that croquet.
• Big lawns — croquet finally makes sense here.
• Beach and sand — bocce and kubb both play on sand; croquet does not.

Ten wooden pins and a ball on short grass. Lawn bowling — sold as skittles or skittle ball — is the fourth rolling game here, and it is the most inclusive game on the whole site: its maker publishes an age floor of three years and up, which nothing else we cover does. Full page: best outdoor bowling set.

Bocce and croquet each gained a buying page too: lighted bocce ball sets, for the one real problem with bocce after sunset, and croquet set sizes, which explains why the player count on the box does not change the size of the court.

The rolling games suit children better than any other family here, and three new pages cover that properly: croquet sets for kids, where mallet length is the whole decision; bocce sets for kids, which covers the soft-surfaced set you can play indoors and on a beach; and Molkky alternatives, for when the Finnish original is not the set in front of you.

Petanque is the boules game for yards bocce cannot use. Steel boules thrown from a fixed 50 cm circle onto gravel or hardpack, under FIPJP rules that fix the ball at 70.5 to 80 mm and 650 to 800 g: best petanque sets. Which of the two your ground suits is settled in bocce vs petanque, and petanque vs lawn bowling covers the choice for a mixed-age crowd. For the youngest players, the ten-pin sets are compared in lawn bowling sets for kids.

The one precision game here that cannot use a lawn at all. A shuffleboard disc slides rather than rolls, so grass stops it within a few feet — which makes a concrete driveway the correct home surface and the court, not the equipment, the real purchase. Published court sizes from a chalked driveway to a 28 foot roll-out court, against the International Shuffleboard Association's 6 by 39 foot playing surface: best outdoor shuffleboard set. It is also the most genuinely inclusive game on this site — a standing push with the cue taking the weight, no throwing and nothing overhead.