Nineteen Pieces, One Federation

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Standard competitive carrom is played with nineteen pieces beyond the striker, nine light carrom men, nine dark, and a single red queen, flicked across a square board between 73.5 and 74 centimetres per side into four corner pockets. That level of standardization did not arrive until relatively recently: organized play may have begun in Sri Lanka as early as 1935, but Sri Lanka and India both had official federations of carrom clubs only by 1958, and it took until 1988, in Chennai, for the International Carrom Federation to be founded as the sport's international governing body, promulgating the international Laws of Carrom. Later federations, the United Kingdom's in 1991 and Pakistan's only in 2004, show how long it took a centuries-old household game to accumulate the formal governing structure a modern international sport is expected to have.