The humble die looms large in my life at the moment. I run a DnD club at school and have mostly learned to differentiate a D20 and a D12 without counting the sides.
And my wife and I play Breakfast Yahtzee most mornings while – you guessed it – eating breakfast.
I mean, I could (and might later) go on about Dungeons and Dragons and how great it is, and how much I get out of it…
But I’m really caught up in the sentience of Yahtzee Dice.
We play Yahtzee a LOT. So I’m not just talking about one game where things went really well and suddenly “Oh the dice are alive!” We will curse the dice. We will cajole the dice. I’ve even threatened the dice.
And the dice will tease us. They will try to trap us into making a certain move. They will favour one player after another and add insult to injury.
Shereen will sing the number song from Sesame Street to get a large straight. And if the last die drops when she’s singing ‘five’ then she’ll usually get it.
The dice try to help me. I’ll be going for fours. I’ll have three fours and one roll left. The last two dice will inevitably add up to four.
I said they tried to help. Not that they knew the rules of the game. It is honestly like I’m playing with a ghost that is trying to help but has no idea what I’m actually trying to do, so it will assist with patterns that could be useful.
It is a peculiar form of mostly harmless insanity, but strangely insistent. We’ll yell at each other when someone says a number while the other person is rolling. I will find a hand shaking method that seems to work and then ramp it up to ridiculous levels. I try not to say anything that sounds like a number that I don’t want while rolling. The dice might misunderstand and give me the wrong number.
Oh yeah! Do you see that “No dibs”? That’s because one time I said “dibs” on a blank sheet and won every single game. So now there’s “no dibs” and “secret dibs” and waving my fingers over the page is enough to drive Shereen crazy paranoid.
We have score sheets going back years. All have a little W (or a huge crowned W) over either mine or Shereen’s name. And drawings. And notes. And shopping lists.
Every time she writes DS, Shereen says “Crumbs DS!” in a Penfold voice. It’s still funny.
I don’t think I could do it on the computer. I need the feel of the dice in my hand. And it’s good for my basic addition skills.
Anyone else have weird traditions or superstitions when playing board games?
