The Dinking Game

Setup

• A normal doubles game: four players, normal serving order, normal kitchen rules, the two-bounce rule. Lobs and everything else are allowed.
• The serve is a dink: hit from the kitchen line, it has to bounce diagonally in the opposite kitchen.

Scoring

• You only score on your serve, as in normal doubles, to 11, win by 2.
• No point comes off the serve directly. A serve into the net or out, or a return into the net or out, is a redo: serve again, nobody scores, nobody loses the serve.
• The penalty: if your team is serving and you speed a ball up and it lands out, not in the court at all, you lose the rally as usual and lose a point. A score never goes below zero.

Turn the dial

Easier — no penalty until one team reaches 5, so everyone settles into the dink rally first.

Harder — any speed-up by the serving team that does not win the rally costs the point, not only the ones that land out.

Harder still — the penalty applies to both teams: a receiving team that speeds up and hits out cannot lose what it does not have, so it gives the serving team a point instead.