I don't like the loud rattle of dice or the way they careen across the table, scattering game markers and ending up on the floor. And so I've been thinking about buying a dice tray. With low walls and a soft interior surface, it solves both problems. When my friend Foaad gave me a huge gift certificate at Dragon's Lair, one of Stockholm's best board and card game stores and the only one to my knowledge which offers gaming tables, I decided it was time.
Check out my beautiful new handmade dice trays! Per Landberger makes these without even being an underpaid Third World sweat shop worker. And it took me a while to realise that they're heptagonal. That's how crazy this guy is. Order them here.
(I also got the 2011 cooperative boardgame Yggdrasil about the twilight of the Norse Gods -- which employs one big chunky six-sided die -- and the 6-player expansion for Settlers.)
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Having gone through college replaying every major battle on Avalon Hill games, I can only relate to hexagons.
I thougt the economic system absolutely demands that we rely on third-world swatshop production, or we will sink into the sea or something...
(OT) Neolithic man: The first lumberjack? http://phys.org/news/2012-08-neolithic-lumberjack.html Cue the Lumberjack song!
He wished he was a girlie, just like his dear Mesolithic papa.
Those are really splendid! The hexagonal version were submitted to the ENnies 2 or 3 years ago now, and IIRC they did got the nomination for Regalia.
If you want to see a flame war of epic, LOTR style proportions, start a thread on a gaming website about dice tray/box preferences. Hoo boy can we get really riled up about minutiae :D
???
But surely the whole point, when you realise you are going to lose, is to hurl the dice so that you knock your opponent's game marker off the board, while saying "Oh I'm so sorry, we'll have to start again." Or did growing up with an older sister who cheated at every game imaginable scar me for life?
You don't need them in backgammon, of course. Do you consider that a board game, and do you ever play it?
I always wonder what the Viking and pre-Viking era gaming pieces were for. I don't suppose there is any way of knowing, is there?
Greg, that was the perfect bait to lay out to catch a couple of Swedes.
Having played SSI and AH games in my earlier days I have to say heptagons are entirely too perverse to contemplate. We got along with boxtops and, a few times, dice cups. A few times we used the pseudo-random RNG an early programmable TI pocket calculator.
We were so into games that we actually played, and completed, the full campaign of War In The East. With something like twenty game, OOA, and supply/production sheets and thousands of little cardboard unit markers spread out over card and piing-pong tables. With seven players it took a couple of months to play out.
That experience has informed my understanding and appreciation of the complication in running bureaucracies. How large projects are much more complicated than the sum of their parts and how getting anything done becomes a matter of navigating layers of priorities and personalities.
oops. Wrong blog.
(OT) Cirith Ungol? "Spider Found Living In Woman's Ear Canal (PHOTO) " http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/09/spider-living-ear-canal-photo-…
Shelix, I didn't know about the ENnie Awards!
John, I used to play backgammon with my first wife. It's certainly a boardgame.
As for Iron Age Scandy games, only one has (probably) survived. Carolus Linnaeus happened upon some Saami in the 18th century who were playing a game whose name tablut is cognate with the sagas' tafl, whose rules match what little the sagas say about tafl and whose rules work with preserved Viking Period gaming gear. Hnefatafl: hand board. Funny thing is that after Linnaeus documented tablut, the Saami apparently abandoned the game.
Thanks Martin, that's interesting.
I assume the church stomped out that "ungodly" game, just like it stomped out the Swedish variant of bagpipes. Also, competition from more recent games coming from the south.The lapps far north would have been the last refugia for the game
(OT) "Remaking history: A new take on how evolution has shaped modern Europeans" http://phys.org/news/2012-08-remaking-history-evolution-modern-european…