Um, there's only five pins

and the balls are the size of softballs.

Welcome to five pin bowling, a truly Canadian sport.

"Five-pin bowling is a bowling variant which is only played in Canada, where many bowling alleys offer it, either alone or in combination with ten-pin bowling. It was devised around 1909 by Thomas F. Ryan in Toronto, Ontario, at his Toronto Bowling Club, in response to customers who complained that the ten-pin game was too strenuous. He cut five tenpins down to about 75% of their size, and used hand-sized hard rubber balls, thus inventing the original version of five-pin bowling." - Wikipedia.com

Thanks to Jodie (pictured above with Dennis) who gathered us together for a dual between the sexes at the Commodore lanes in downtown Vancouver.

J and I had a few things to learn before we could get rolling. You get three balls per frame and if you knock down all the pins on the first balls - it's a strike; if you knock the pins down with two balls - it's a spare; if you clear the slate on ball three - well great but no bonus. Each pin has a point value (center pin 5 pts, the right and left of the center 3 pts and the outside pins 2pts for a total of 15 pts). We also got to manually score, which is something I haven't done in years.

Although J and I had not been five pin bowling before and we were both used to the larger bowling balls, we both found our scores at the topping those of our Canadian teammates.