The world has long celebrated the "critical hit" D20 face, the elusive 20 that doubles the damage and sets the players around the table baying with elation; but consider its opposite face, the lowly 1, the "critical failure" that lets a sadistic DM dream up all kinds of pratfalls and own-goals to punish the luckless player with. Read the rest
German pastry chef, gamer, cosplayer, and Twittizen, Sonja decided to make a batch of edible candy RPG/polyhedral dice. She posted pictures on Twitter and all the nerds came running to her yard. Realizing she might have a hungry market on her hands, Sonja has quickly opened up an Etsy store, the cleverly-named, Sugar and Dice.
Batches of the dice are Isomalt sugar and are edible. They can either be "eaten as a hard candy bonbon or dissolved into a hot cup of tea or coffee." Sonja points out that they are not balanced and not perfect on all sides, so they can't really be reliably used in gaming.
A set of 7 dice (1 each of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d100, and d20) will run you £18, shipped to the US (and take 1-2 weeks). Not exactly penny candy, but a cool novelty and a unique, fun gift for a gamer friend. I will definitely be getting some. A set of these will make a nice gaming night prize. Read the rest
Tim Harford (previously) turned me on to Martin Lloyd's Amazing Tales, a storytelling RPG designed to be played between a grownup games-master and one or more kids. Read the rest
I'm pretty sure no game in our home has its original dice. I replace what the dice fairy doth steal, I bought this useful pound bag of dice.
I do not know where the dice go. The only thing I'm sure of is that my dogs aren't eating the missing dice, as I'm pretty sure I'd see them when cleaning up the yard. Regardless, somehow every game that needs dice loses those dice. If this happens to you, I suggest a pound bag of dice.
There are 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 and 30 sided die in the bag. Sparkly, opaque, marbled, solid colors, speckled... dice.
Chessex "Pound-O-Dice" via Amazon Read the rest
My friend Kent Barnes recommended this simple, fast-moving dice game called Tenzi. I bought it and my wife, 11-year-old daughter, and I had fun playing it. The rules are simple - everyone starts out with 10 dice and the goal is to roll your dice as fast as you can until all of them show the same number. Every time you roll, you are allowed to set aside any dice that match your desired number. When all ten of the dice show the same number, you shout "Tenzi!," throw your hands in the air, and gloat while the other players gnash their teeth. The game rules included a couple of variations on the basic rule set, which we also played and liked.
A few days later Kent told me about a deck of cards called 77 Ways to Play Tenzi. I ordered the deck and last night my wife, 11-year-old, 16-year-old daughter (who doesn't like games and joined us reluctantly), and I tested the deck out. Ninety minutes later we decided that this deck takes Tenzi to a new level. The deck adds variety, surprise, and humor to Tenzi. It makes Tenzi so much more fun that I think the company shouldn't sell the dice without the cards. My 16-year-old daughter was surprised that she had such a good time.
Each Tenzi card has a variation of the basic rules. The rules for the variants are simple enough that they can be described in one or two sentences. Here are a few examples:
To win the above game, you start with nine dice and roll until you get nine threes. Read the rest
The microgravity of space would really put a damper on your dice games. You roll them and they don't land. The 3D Printing Professor has a fun solution. Space Dice (via Adafruit)
Rough metal dice, fresh off the forge! Dice so heavy and clunky and sharp you can ruin tables and kill cheats without brandishing a dagger. But is this ren-faire fun fair play? I decided to put them to the test and see how random they were. I'm not great at math, so I'll just show my method and results and you can do the judging. Read the rest
Each face of a Dungeon Morph die features an interlinking section of dungeons, caves, wilderness or medieval city: simply push a set of five together and remove and re-roll as needed to create a never-ending map for your adventures.
DungeonMorph Dice Adventurer Set [Amazon link; see also the other sets]
They also come in the form of a square deck of 90 double-sided cards.
There's something about this sort of thing that throws a hook into my brain and reels me in. Read the rest
[While I'm away for a week, I'm posting classic Boing Boing entries from the archives. Here's a gem from 2006.]
I'm reading a terrific book by William Poundstone called Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System that Beat the Casinos and Wall Street. On page 153 Poundstone writes about a 1968 dinner meeting between mathematician Edward Thorp and fund manager Warren Buffett. Poundstone mentions in passing that Buffett and Thorpe discussed their shared interest in nontransitive dice. "These are a mathematical curiosity, a type of 'trick' dice that confound most people's ideas about probability," writes Poundstone.
Curious, I googled "nontransitive dice" and found a nice description of them by Ivars Peterson at the Mathematical Association of America's website.
Peterson introduces the subject with this intriguing paragraph:
The game involves four specially numbered dice. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three dice. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins the throw. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more throws, you will nearly always have more wins.
The trick is to always let your opponent pick first, and then you pick the die to the left of his selection (if he picks the die with the four 4s, then circle round to the die with the three ones). It's just like playing Rock, Paper, Scissors -- only you get to see what the other guy picks in advance.
With these dice, you always have a 2/3 probability of winning -- what a great sucker's bet! Read the rest
@kirin_nico has created a large robotic die that, when rolled—if any side other than six comes up—it unfolds and then refolds itself so the six side is upward.
It does this slowly and spastically, reveling in its homemade awkwardness and making clunky sounds like a kid’s toy having a stroke. In other words, it’s not pretending to be anything other than what it is, which is why it’s cool.
Original Source: Rocket News Read the rest
Here's the rule: design a 2-sided die that is not coin shaped. Many people have tried, with varying degrees of success. Core77 has a gallery of some attempts. Here are a few: Read the rest
You can own a D20 die carved from a 10,000-year-old wooly mammoth tusk for just $249. Read the rest
Zombies aren't known for their critical thinking skills, but in Zombie Dice, a fast-paced, risk-vs-reward dice-rolling game designed by Steve Jackson, you play a zombie who must balance its desire for human brains with its fear of getting blasted to necrotic bits by a shotgun.
The game comes with 13 specially marked dice. The dice have three kinds of markings: brains, shotgun blasts, and footprints. (Green dice have more brains, red dice have more shotgun blasts, yellow dice are in-between).
The rules are simple: two or more people can play. Everyone is a zombie. The dice represent humans. When it's your turn, pull three dice from the cardboard cup (without looking) and roll them. Set any brains to one side. Set any shotgun blasts to the other side. Footprints mean the human got away - keep those in front of you. Do you want to roll again? No problem. Just re-roll the footprints dice along with enough fresh dice from the cup so that you roll three dice. You can roll as many times as you like in an effort to eats lots of brains in your turn (my record is 11 juicy brains in one turn), but if you end up accumulating three shotgun blasts, you lose all your brain points for that turn and the next player-zombie gets its turn. When one player gets 13 points, play continues until the round is finished and whoever has the most points wins. Read the rest
A couple of weeks ago my friend Kent Barnes recommended a simple, fast-moving dice game called Tenzi. I bought it and my wife, 11-year-old daughter, and I had fun playing it. The rules are simple - everyone starts out with 10 dice and the goal is to roll your dice as fast as you can until all of them show the same number. Every time you roll, you are allowed to set aside any dice that match your desired number. When all ten of the dice show the same number, you shout "Tenzi!," throw your hands in the air, and gloat while the other players gnash their teeth. The game rules included a couple of variations on the basic rule set, which we also played and liked.
A few days later Kent told me about a $(removed) deck of cards called 77 Ways to Play Tenzi. I ordered the deck and last night my wife, 11-year-old, 16-year-old daughter (who doesn't like games and joined us reluctantly), and I tested the deck out. Ninety minutes later we decided that this deck takes Tenzi to a new level. The deck adds variety, surprise, and humor to Tenzi. It makes Tenzi so much more fun that I think the company shouldn't sell the dice without the cards. My 16-year-old daughter was surprised that she had such a good time.
77 Ways to Play Tenzi | Buy Tenzi cards and dice as a set Read the rest
Though I've never played a pen-and-paper RPG in my life, I'm completely in love with the dice. At Comic-Con, a company called Chessex had more on offer, in more shapes, sizes and geometries, than I'd ever seen in my life. Irresistable! Read the rest
