3, 2, 1, Jugger! Richard Jana
Over the summer, a new and exciting phenomenon has started to infect the Helsinki archaeologist community: Jugger! If you visited Töölönlahden puisto on a Sunday afternoon this summer, you might have heard the call “3, 2, 1, Jugger!” followed by two groups of people with long weapons charging at each other and dispersing into a chaotic looking battle. However, appearances are deceptive, and most things about Jugger are not what they initially appear to be… The first thing people usually ask when they see is along the lines of “doesn’t this hurt?” or “isn’t this dangerous?”, to which the answer is: No. The “weapons” are well padded and very light (approximately 300 grams) – in practice, hits that are actually difficult to notice are more common than ones that are a bit hard. Additionally, hits to the head are not allowed for safety, but wouldn’t be a problem either way. With that out of the way, what is it that we are doing? At its core, Jugger is a normal ball game: The objective is to put a ball into a goal; when you do, your team scores a point and the team with the most points wins. What sets Jugger apart is the fencing: When a player gets hit with one of the
weapons, they get a time penalty of a few seconds. The other team then has superior numbers for this short time and will try to leverage this advantage to score a point. Jugger started in 1989 as a game that was played in an Australian movie. A few years later it was adopted by role-playing groups and has since turned into a sport – players don’t wear costumes and the weapons look more like oversized cotton swabs than anything you might find on an excavation. Every year there are many tournaments being held around the world and footage can be found on YouTube. (Mind, there are also videos of other flavors of Jugger which stick closer to the brutal game from the movie – you’ll notice how they wear armor and we don’t.) While there are teams all over the world, most of them are located in Germany, Spain and Latin America. In Finland there are currently only two teams: the Jugger Helsinki team and one in Turku. We started our team early this summer and have attracted a diverse group of players,
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