I like toys. I’m fascinated by ideas for devices to help with petanque practice.
Here is a photo taken at a petanque tournament in 2015 at Ville de Romans-sur-Isère. At first I thought that it was some kind of petanque practice device.
I think it is a modified version of a traditional French game called boule à la pente (ball up the slope). The goal is to roll balls up the board and into the holes.
A similar game, called bumble puppy (also known as “nine holes”), was a popular pub game in England in the late 1700s. Here it is being played in 1803.
Another version of bumble puppy was played on a slanting board with nine compartments rather than holes.
This table-top game is known to have existed as early as 1530. In France in the 17th century it was known as trou madame. It was played with balls or with rolling disks, either on the ground or on a table-top. 
You can see a device for playing ground-level trou madame at the left side of the photo of boule à la pente (above). In this YouTube video of Festival de Pétanque Düsseldorf 2010 you can see a version being played with petanque boules (it appears briefly at about 4:30).
It’s an easy transition from trou madame to a pointing-practice device. This home-made device appears on the Midwest Petanque Alliance web site.
Here is a very sturdy version of the same idea. If you don’t feel like nailing together a few pieces of scrap lumber, you can buy it from a German company for only 400 euros.
The same Germany company also offers shooting training devices that automatically pull the target boule back into place, allowing you immediately to shoot at it again. In this device, the target boule is suspended from a crossbar.
It’s a good idea, but probably not worth hundreds of Euros. A villager in Thailand built his own version of this device with a few pieces of old pipe and some cheap leisure boules.
This device allows you to attach 1, 2, or 3 target boules to it via springs.
I don’t understand why these devices cost hundreds of Euros when for a few dollars you can easily build something yourself that works quite well. I tied a whiffle ball ($5 at my local Ace hardware store) to a length of bungee cord. It works great.
This device appears in a post on the Brighton Petanque Club web site. 
“The club at Istrès held an informal Shooting a Back Boule competition one afternoon. Shooting a Back Boule at 10m is one of the great traditions at French clubs. Shooting is, of course, a key part of the game and shooting a back boule at 10m is one of the hardest tests shooters have to face. You can just place two boules on the terrain but often you’ll see a special area set aside for such practice – usually either an old tire with two boules bolted on or a piece of rubber, which is what we have at Brighton and what they used at Istrès.”
A simple device to assist in practicing shooting au fer is a barrier in front of the target boule. In this shooting workshop at the Tucson Petanque Club, the barriers are 8-foot 2x4s, cut in half, with the halves duct-taped together.
Two of the strangest devices I’ve seen are these. In this 2009 video their inventor, Louis Amour, shows them in action. They are actually rather neat devices for drawing the target circle (cible) and positioning the target balls for a precision-shooting contest.
These devices appeared in 2007 on the blog of the Midwest Petanque Alliance. They may be some early prototypes made by Louis Amour.
Another device of this type is available at PetanqueShop.com, while an elegant version (see below) is available at the Rocher family website.![Outil_de_placement_boules_tir_de_precision-2[1]](https://petanque.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/outil_de_placement_boules_tir_de_precision-21.jpg?w=320)
Here is a Youtube video demonstrating a similar tool. Skip to about 2:20 to see the actual demonstration.
On the Facebook page of the Zanesfield Petanque Club Bo Johns provided a picture of his “indoor shooting pit”.
HOW TO BUILD AN INDOOR PIT (AKA Giant litter-box) 1) Disassemble your large-breed's dog cage 2) Steal the bottom section of the cage 3) Steal the dog's mattress to use as landing pad 4) Snatch 4 short posts from the neighbor's fence to use as stoppers 5) Use large plastic strap to hold fence posts 6) You're all set for winter practices.
Here is a newer version of the same idea.
Is that home plate? Or a shooting pit?
A wooden bench placed near the jack can help to practice lobbing. The red arrow in this photo of a Japanese training session points to the thrown boule, which is dropping nearly vertically onto the target. Marco Foyot runs training classes with crossbars of PVC pipe placed in the same way.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like our post on automatic boule return devices or how to build a shooting pit.
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