Bean bag

This page refers to a bag containing beans. For the musical genre see beanbag music. For the Christian rock group of the same name see Beanbag

A bean bag is a sealed bag containing dried beans or PVC pellets, with various applications.

Games

Footbag (also hacky sack) is a type of ball-shaped bean bag that is used to play various games.

Freestyle hackysack involves performing tricks while keeping the bean bag airborne for an extended period of time.

Bean Bag, sometimes called Cornhole in the midwest United States, is a game similar to horseshoes, played with bean bags and two goals.

Circle kick (also hacking circle) requires several players to test their skills against one another and attempt to get a hack, where each one of the players hits the hackysack at least once in a sequence before the hack hits the ground.

In Killer (also known as 'Snake' or 'Welt') the players start off with a circle kick and try to hit the other players with the hackysack. Often there is a set number of times the hackysack must be kicked before it can be kicked at another person. If the other person is hit with it, he is out, but if he kicks it back, he remains in the game.

In Numbers, the players start off with a circle kick, and each consecutive holder of the hackysack must kick it a certain number of times. The number increases on every success.

Furniture

Bean bag chairs are a popular form of furniture made of fabric and filled with small chunks of styrofoam or PVC pellets. They were hugely popular as "mod" furniture during the late 1960s and early '70s; their popularity resumed in the mid 1990s, as companies such as Cuddlebag and LoveSac Corda-Roy's[http://www.cordaroys.com/" target="_blank" >^* have begun selling chairs filled with shredded polyurethane foam, charging a premium for the extra comfort this can provide. Bean bag chairs are known to bean bag enthusiasts by many names, such as "Physics Bag" or "Oversized Sac".

Bean bags today use polystyrene bead for filling. Polystyrene bead originally comes in a sugar form and steam is blown into the sugar to expand it. It is also called expanded polystyrene or EPS in the industry. The diameter of the bead that goes into the bean bag does vary from about 3 - 9 mm, however you can now also purchase micro-bead which is 1 - 3 mm in diameter. After a couple of years use, the beans within a bean bag will become compressed and comfort will be reduced. You can generally pick up smaller bags of refill to top them up.

In 2005 a UK based company called Ambient Lounge developed a new style of bean bag, shifting away from the standard blob style to a more stylish designer range of furniture. This style of bean bag has quickly caught on with expats living in London, primarily because they don't want to buy expensive leather suites to only use for a couple of years before returning to their home overseas.

Toys

Beans bags, often simply small bags literally filled with dried beans, are used in a number of children's games involving throwing and catching or throwing at targets.

The fad-toy Beanie Babies are in fact bean bags.

Juggling

In juggling bean bags are often used in place of juggling balls. The two props are considered equivalent for the purposes of recording world records.

Projectile

See Flexible baton round.

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