Blow football

Blow football is a tabletop game, popular in the United Kingdom, in which players blow through a pipe or straw to push a small lightweight ball across a playing surface and into an opponent's goal. Reuben Heaton patented the game in 1893 and marketed it as Football for the Table, describing it as an amusing game for hotels, coffee houses, and clubs; later manufacturers including Spears Games, Peter Pan Playthings, and J and L Randall produced their own commercial versions. A boxed set typically includes plastic pipes, a lightweight ball such as a ping-pong ball, a cloth or rigid playing surface with raised boundaries to keep the ball in play, and sometimes small plastic goalkeepers mounted on sticks that a player can slide to defend the goal. Players can also improvise the game with nothing more than drinking straws and a ping-pong ball on any flat table, which has helped it remain a simple, low-cost party and pub game well over a century after its original patent.