I love 'cue sports' like billiards and whatnot. Cue sports are games of skill played with a cue stick, where you strike balls and make them move around a table with pockets they fall in on the corners and sides.
Shooting pool is a lot of fun. I haven't played pool in a long time.  What's your favorite type of pool game?
In British and Australian English, 'billiards' refers only to the game of English billiards while in American and Canadian English it gets used to refer to a class of games or to all cue games in general. I like straight pool.
Straight pool is the good way of having fun.   I didn't even know they had different types of billiards.  In fact I didn't even know billiards only refers to pool.  How interesting!
There's three kinds of games in cue sports. There's the ones that use obstacles and targets and the table-top games that use disks instead of balls. 
Pretty cool.  Is shuffleboard a part of billiard games?    How about fooseball?  probably butchered the spelling
In history it was always called billiards, although I call it pool. I'm not sure if fooseball or shuffleboard are considered cue games but I would consider them.
I wonder who created the name for billiards