The sounds of pins crashing down lanes and balls being thrown too hard on the slippery floors while an eleven-year-old’s birthday party sings over a cake is an all too familiar scene at ten-pin bowling alleys across the country, but there’s a different kind of bowling gaining popularity in metro Detroit.

Duckpin bowling uses balls that are much smaller than that of ten-pin bowling, barely being larger than the average hand. They don’t have holes for your fingers. Duckpin bowling pins are smaller and further apart. The lanes are shorter and games tend to be quicker.

In addition to duckpin bowling, there’s candlepin bowling, which uses a handheld-sized ball and pins that are tall and narrow and look like candles. It is played primarily in New England and Canada.

While there are no candlepin bowling locations in or around metro Detroit, there are a couple duckpin bowling places. While novices, Mirror News layout editor, Olivia Draus, and I attempted both sports to compare ten-pin bowling with duckpin bowling.

Within Metro Detroit there are a few places that offer duckpin bowling so we decided to try one location that is in the Corktown Taphouse. We paid $45 for our reservation for two at 11 a.m. for one hour of bowling.

What we didn’t realize when we made the reservation was that the taphouse also opened at 11 a.m. so we were the first and only people there for about 20 minutes. While it was extremely awkward at first throwing heavy balls onto a floor in an otherwise completely empty restaurant, we very quickly fell into the groove of it.

In ten-pin bowling, each player gets two attempts at the ten pins per frame, but in duckpin bowling each person gets three tries per frame. The technique to duckpin bowling involves learning how to toss and roll the ball down the lane. This difference makes it immensely easier to pick up spares and feel good about each frame that you play. There weren’t a lot of times where we completely threw the ball into the gutter, which is the worst part of bowling. Usually, if we earned no points from a throw, it’s because there were so few pins still standing it was extremely hard to hit any of the small pins with the small balls.

Olivia won our first game with a score of 96 and I ended with a score of 88. With the exception of there being three frames per turn, scoring is similar to ten-pin bowling.

This first game only took us 25 minutes to complete so we continued on with our second game. I won our second game 105 to 99. At this point we wished that we had booked our reservation for an evening slot so that we could fully feel the vibes and feel of the taphouse at its peak hours but we enjoyed the relative privacy and sense of speciality.

As we wrapped up our second game, we realized neither of us had rolled a perfect strike the entire time we’d been playing. We decided to make that our goal, to see if it’s possible to roll a strike in duckpin bowling.

With only ten minutes left of the hour that we paid for we kept rolling the balls over and over again, only aiming for a strike. Two pins. Six pins. Eight pins. Nine pins. But never all ten. We left duckpin bowling with a win for each of us and a friendly “Thanks for coming!” from the staff, but no strikes. We had an incredibly good time duckpin bowling at Corktown Taphouse. The atmosphere of the place was welcoming, the game fostered excitement rather than frustration, and the rapidity of each game let us get two and a half games in.

After we went duckpin bowling, we decided to try ten-pin bowling. We rented a lane at Ford Lanes Bowling for $42 for one hour the next day at noon. There were more people there than at Corktown Taphouse. On our right side was a group of older men playing an extremely competitive game in which they were up to the high 200s in their scores and on our left was a small family of five trying their best and having fun.

Admittedly, I hadn’t been bowling in possibly eight years or longer, not since a birthday party long gone. So I was essentially going in blind, relying on the memory of eleven-year-old me to form my expectations.

After putting on our borrowed bowling shoes and heavy balls, we started rolling. We immediately recognized how much longer each frame and turn took. Because the balls are heavy and how they must be rolled with your fingers in the ball, aiming and putting enough force behind the ball is more difficult than rolling duckpin bowling balls.

At the beginning of our game we were rolling poorly, I hit three frames of just gutterballs. Our scores tanked. After forty minutes of ten-pin bowling, we ended the game with scores of 48 and 43, Olivia just beating me. I know most people are probably much better bowlers than we are, but throwing gutterball after gutterball was extremely disheartening and made the experience just not as fun as duckpin bowling.

With just two of us playing, we finished the first game with just over twenty minutes left. With not enough time to play another full game, we tried getting a strike. During the actual game we’d bowled, I actually got one strike. As hard as we tried to bowl another strike, we got six frames in with no luck. We left the alley with low scores and shallower pockets.

While the familiar ten-pin bowling remains the most popular form of bowling, duckpin bowling we found can make for much more bang for your buck, with quicker games and more turns during each frame, especially for the novice bowler.

For hours for duckpin bowling or to make a reservation at the Corktown Taphouse go to: corktowntaphouse.com. Reservations are also available at Detroit Duckpin in downtown Detroit at: detroitduckpin.com.