Unique, Weird and Unusual Sports: Games People Really Play

​Most sports you already know, these you probably don't.

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This is where we keep the games that don't fit anywhere else, the ones invented in a single village, played at the bottom of a swimming pool, or built on rules that sound made up until you watch them. Sepak takraw, where players send a rattan ball over a net using only their feet. Underwater hockey. Kabaddi. Hurling. Chess boxing, which is exactly what it sounds like and alternates rounds of each.

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You'll find three kinds of strange here. Old sports with deep roots and small but fierce followings. Brand-new inventions still writing their own rulebooks. And the physically absurd, sports that ask the human body to do something it really wasn't built for. Some you can take up this weekend, others you'll only ever watch with your jaw on the floor.

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Every one of the 37 below is real, organised and genuinely played, most with clubs, federations and world championships behind them. If a sport ever made you stop and say "wait, that's real?", it lives here.

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Old sports with deep roots

Games that were old before anyone thought to write the rules down. Most are tied to one region, one valley, or one festival, and most have survived because a community refused to let them go.

• Hurling (Ireland). Played with a hurley and a small leather sliotar, Ireland's national field game lets a player sprint the length of the pitch with the ball balanced on the stick. Governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association. Read our full guide.

• Shinty (Scottish Highlands). No handling is allowed at all in this Highland stick game, and the goalkeeper may only slap the ball with an open hand inside the nine metre area, never catch it. Governed by the Camanachd Association.

• Jai alai (Basque Country). Played with a curved wicker basket strapped to the arm, which hurls the ball at speeds above 300 km/h, making it one of the fastest ball sports ever measured.

• Kabaddi (South Asia). A contact sport with no ball at all. One raider enters the opposition half, and the rules require them to chant "kabaddi" clearly and continuously, without a break, for as long as they are over there.

• Sepak takraw (Southeast Asia). Volleyball played with everything except the hands. Players clear a five-foot net with overhead bicycle kicks, striking a woven rattan ball. Read our full guide.

• Chinlone (Myanmar). Six players keep a woven rattan ball in the air together using feet, knees, shoulders and head. There is no opposing team and no score. Nobody is trying to beat anybody. Read our full guide.

• Hornussen (Switzerland). A 400 year old farmers' game where one team launches a 78 gram puck off a ramp at speeds up to roughly 300 km/h, and the other team tries to swat it out of the sky with wooden boards. Read our full guide.

• Naghol (Vanuatu). The land diving ritual of southern Pentecost Island, where men dive headfirst from wooden towers up to around 30 metres with liana vines tied to their ankles. No harness, no helmet, no net. Read our full guide.

• Calcio storico (Florence, Italy). Medieval football played 27 a side each June in Piazza Santa Croce, where a shot that sails over the net rather than into it hands the opposition half a point. Read our full guide.

• Oil wrestling (Türkiye). Wrestlers coat themselves in olive oil and grapple in kıspet, thick trousers cut from hide, at the Kırkpınar festival in Edirne. The 2026 edition was the 665th.

• Kok boru (Kyrgyzstan). Two mounted teams contest a goat carcass, now usually a moulded replica in sanctioned play, scoring by dropping it into the opposing team's goal, the tai kazan. Listed by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage.

• Pesäpallo (Finland). Finland's national game and a distant relative of baseball, where the pitcher must throw the ball straight up, at least a metre above their own head, so that it drops down onto the plate.

• Fierljeppen (Friesland, Netherlands). Competitors sprint at a pole up to 13.25 metres tall, climb several metres up it while it topples, then let go and drop into a sandpit on the far side of a canal.

• Klootschieten (Netherlands and north-west Germany). Players hurl a lead-weighted ball underarm along country lanes and open fields, and how far it rolls after landing counts towards the score just as much as the throw.

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New inventions still writing the rulebook

Somebody sat down and invented these, most of them within living memory, and several within the last twenty years. A few already have world championships. One of them was designed by a scientist specifically to stop people getting hurt.

• Chess boxing. Alternating rounds of blitz chess and boxing in the same match, decided by checkmate, knockout, or the clock running out at the board. Read our full guide.

• Pickleball. The paddle sport that went from a driveway game to millions of players, and proof that an unusual sport can turn mainstream inside a generation. Read our full guide.

• Tchoukball (Switzerland, 1970). Invented by biologist Hermann Brandt to reduce sporting injuries. It bans physical contact entirely and forbids defenders from intercepting passes, so blocking an opponent is simply not possible. Read our full guide.

• Korfball (Netherlands, 1902). Teams of eight field four men and four women, and each player may only defend an opponent of the same gender. One of the very few sports designed as mixed from the start. Read our full guide.

• Quadball (United States, 2005). Born at Middlebury College in Vermont, it dropped the name quidditch in 2022. No team may have more than three players of the same gender on the pitch at once.

• Bossaball (Belgian invention, developed in Spain). Played on an inflatable court with trampolines built into each side. The match official, called the samba referee, umpires while playing percussion and working DJ decks.

• Kin-ball (Quebec, 1986). Three teams of four play at the same time. The serving team must shout "Omnikin" and a colour to name which of the other two teams has to catch the 1.22 metre ball.

• Slamball (United States, 1999). Four a side, played over trampolines sunk into the court either side of the hoop. Dunks are worth three points and body checking is legal.

• Headis (Germany, 2006). Table tennis played using only the head, with a rubber ball. A student invented it at a Kaiserslautern swimming pool after finding the football pitch already taken.

• Footgolf (Netherlands, 2008). A size 5 football kicked around a golf course into cups 50 to 52 centimetres wide. Football boots and cleats are banned, so players compete in trainers.

• Floorball (Sweden). An indoor stick sport whose clearest oddity sits in goal: under international rules, the goalkeeper is not allowed to use a stick at all.

• Hado (Japan, 2014). Three a side in head-mounted displays and armband sensors, throwing virtual energy balls on a real court. A full match lasts 80 seconds. Founder Hiroshi Fukuda built it out of a childhood wish to throw a hadouken, and it now runs a world cup. More on where this is heading in our technology and sport section.

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The physically absurd

Sports that ask the body to do something it was never built for, usually in a place it has no business being. Several are genuine competitive disciplines. Several are a village having a very committed day out. All of them are real.

• Underwater hockey. Also called Octopush. A full team sport played on the floor of a swimming pool with snorkels and short sticks, where nobody can breathe and nobody can shout. Read our full guide.

• Cycle ball. Football on fixed-gear bikes, two a side, played entirely without hands and without putting a foot down. Read our full guide.

• Parkour (Paris, 1990s). Moving through an environment as efficiently as possible. Less about rooftop jumps than the videos suggest: beginners spend most of their time on landing technique, balance and small vaults. Read our full guide.

• Bog snorkelling (Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales). Two 60 yard lengths of a peat trench cut into the bog, in a snorkel and flippers. Recognised swimming strokes are banned, so it is doggy paddle or nothing.

• Wife carrying (Sonkajärvi, Finland). A 253.5 metre course with two dry obstacles and a water pit a metre deep. The winning pair takes home the carried partner's weight in drink.

• Extreme ironing (England, 1997). Carrying a board and an iron to a cliff face, a riverbed or a treetop, and then actually pressing a garment there. The pressing is not optional; that is the whole point.

• Toe wrestling (Ashbourne, Derbyshire). Barefoot opponents lock big toes across a low board called the toedium, and win a round by forcing the other person's foot over against the stanchion.

• Shin kicking (Cotswolds, England). Part of Robert Dover's Cotswold Olimpick Games. Opponents grip each other by the shoulders, pad their shins with straw handed out by the organisers, and kick until one of them goes down.

• Bo-taoshi (Japan). Pole toppling played 150 a side by cadets at the National Defense Academy each November. Your team loses the moment its pole tilts to thirty degrees.

• Swamp football (Hyrynsalmi, Finland). Football on a peat bog that swallows your boots. The offside rule is scrapped entirely and teams can substitute as often as they like at the centre line.

• Cheese rolling (Cooper's Hill, Gloucestershire). Runners chase a three kilogram Double Gloucester down a hill so steep most of them fall. There is no organising body, so everyone takes part entirely at their own risk.

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What counts as a weird sport?

Three things, usually. Some sports are unusual by combination, splicing two familiar games into something new, the way chess boxing alternates rounds at the board and in the ring. Some are unusual by environment, taking a familiar idea somewhere unexpected, like hockey on the floor of a pool or football on bicycles. And some are unusual only to outsiders. Sepak takraw looks exotic on a first viewing, yet it fills stadiums across Southeast Asia, and kabaddi is watched by millions.

That last category is why we write these guides with respect rather than novelty. Today's weird sport is often another region's national game, and occasionally, as pickleball shows, tomorrow's global boom.

It is also our standard for what goes on this page. We confirm the sport exists as described, check its rules and origins against governing bodies and official rulebooks rather than repeating what circulates online, and say plainly when a popular claim turns out not to hold up. The strangeness is the hook. The substance is the point.

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