TrulyObscure - article - Games - trulyrandom - More Speed - Less Bad-minton

Posted by Greg May Nov 16, 05:11 PM to games : trulyrandom -

You love racquet sports, but don’t have much space/time/money. Ping pong requires a nice, flat table (which isn’t cheap). Tennis is worse: you need a fairly large amount of space to even hit the ball around, if you can find a nearby free court. Handball and racquetball are out, of course. Which leaves badminton- long less popular in America than it deserves to be. Badminton, though, is terrible on windy days and tends to be more than a little slow and difficult to pick up.

Which is why Pro Performance Sports should have a successful product on their hands with Speedminton. “Combining the best of tennis, badminton, and racquetball” they say, and in fact it is faster and easier to pick up than other racquet sports. It has some of the strategy of tennis and takes up just enough space to work well in a driveway.

You use specially designed racquets and birdies (they call them “speeders”) to play, and the game works pretty well even in fairly windy weather- a small rubber ring is included in the set to make the birdies weather-resistant enough to play on an aircraft carrier. Best of all, the birdies/speeders are bright neon colors, and the set includes a few glow in the dark attachments for after hours play!

For $60, you get two racquets, several speeders, a few glow in the dark “speedlights”, a decent carrying case, and a few cones so you can easily setup a court. Everything is fairly durable, and our testers found the game easy to pickup, and fairly relaxing. Speedminton probably won’t make it into the Olympic games anytime soon, but there aren’t many better ways to spend an afternoon with racquets.