Croquet similar to those described above for Association Croquet with three major differences: This version of the game is easy for beginners to learn. The main Garden Croquet Club in the UK is the Bygrave Croquet Club which is a private club with five lawns. Other clubs also use garden croquet as an introduction to the game, notably the Hampstead Heath Croquet Club and the Watford Croquet Club. The American rules version of croquet, another six-hoop game, is the dominant version of the game in the United States and is also widely played in Canada. It is governed by the United
Croquet (depending on whether sticks were used), was regularly played in France and southern Britain between villages or parishes; it was attested in Cornwall as early as 1283. In the book "Queen of Games: The History of Croquet", Nicky Smith presents two theories of the origin of the modern game of croquet, which took England by storm in the 1860s and then spread overseas. The first explanation is that the ancestral game was introduced to Britain from France during the 1630–1685 reign of Charles II of England, and was played under the name of ' (among other spellings, today usually "pall-mall"),