New piecepack components? Dice cards and paper dice

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

Piecepack dice cards and paper dice are in my opinion the best
nominees for the next expansions to the piecepack (I consider the last
really interesting expansion to be Mesomorph pawn saucers, and before
that, AlphaTim's piecepack pyramids).  Piecepack dice cards were
suggested by my friend John Braley during a game of Chariots on 31
January 2004 as a way to make die rolls more fair, or at least _feel_
more fair to the players.  The idea is similar to a gizmo we often use
at Seattle Cosmic Game Night called the Deck of Dice:

  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/5460
  http://www.panix.com/~sos/bc/deckdice.html

The Deck of Dice depicts two six-sided dice (one black, one white) in
every possible combination.  Our players use it during Settlers of
Catan and related games, and indeed people do complain less about (for
example) the Robber coming up too often, because they know that the
Robber comes up _exactly_ as often as ought to be expected.

Unfortunately, the Deck of Dice is patented.  If people want to see
the patent, it is number 5,904,353 at <http://www.uspto.gov>. You can
also follow this short link:

  http://snipurl.com/dodpat

I believe this is a "bad" patent, and that there is prior art -- that
is, people were using decks of cards and similar devices simulating
dice rolls for years before Dice Corp. came along and patented the
idea.  This kind of thing happens because the Patent Office is swamped
with patent applications right now, and rather than spend days or
weeks on a patent, as they used to, patent examiners right now
literally spend only a few _hours_ examining each patent, then
rubber-stamp it.  The result is a "chilling effect"
<http://www.chillingeffects.org/>.  The piecepack community has
already felt such a chilling effect with the introduction of
AlphaTim's piecepack pyramids, which Andrew Looney said infringed on
his (in my opinion) similarly "bad" Icehouse pyramid patent, without
his even having seen a set of piecepack pyramids, an issue on which he
later vacillated.

The question is, how can we avoid legal action or such a chilling
effect in the case of piecepack dice cards?  In fact, we are
experiencing a chilling effect right now, simply by having to ask the
question.  I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion, however bad the Deck
of Dice patent is, unless someone in the piecepack community is
prepared to go to court (and it takes a lot of time and money to
defeat a bad patent, something people who take them out use to their
great advantage), the trick is to avoid infringing on the specific
features of the patent.  In this case, the patent is specifically on a
deck of 36 cards showing every possible combination of rolls of 2d6.
It might be enough simply to depict _one_ piecepack die on each card,
something I would want to do anyway, so that each suit of dice could
have its own deck.

So here is what I propose: that someone (me, if no one else steps up
to do so) produce a printable deck of cards consisting of four suits
of six cards each, each card depicting one unique face of a single
piecepack die.  People can then use a suit of piecepack dice cards to
represent six "hyper-fair" die rolls, then after six "rolls", shuffle
the deck again.  If you don't want to shuffle your deck every six
rolls, you can print multiple copies of the deck, so that each suit
has, say, 24 cards in it (four sets of six possible rolls).  24 cards
per suit would make for a 96-card deck, and the number 24 aligns
nicely with the rest of the piecepack.

Of course, if you are not already using either tiles or coins in your
game design, you could simulate a single suit of six die rolls with
either the tiles or the coins, so in a sense this is nothing new for
the piecepack (can anyone name a game that already does this?).  It
would be somewhat new and useful to have a suit of 24 cards, though,
and of course we could make it _feel_ new by printing the suit and
value information on a little cube on the card that looks like a
die. :)

Another piecepack accessory that would die rolls "fair" is "paper
dice".  Compare my "low-tech game systems" article in _The Games
Journal_, and see the section "Paper Games and Board Games:
Similarities" near the bottom:

  http://www.thegamesjournal.com/articles/GameSystems4.shtml

By the way, this is some of what I would consider prior
art, since Schmittberger's book _New Rules for Classic Games_ was
published in 1992, and the Deck of Dice patent is from 1999.

To simulate four 24-card suits of piecepack dice cards, one might do
something like this:

Suns
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5

Moons
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5

Crowns
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5

Arms
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5
N A 2 3 4 5

(Sorry for the waste of horizontal space, but it would look crappy
in Yahoo's web archive otherwise.)

It could be ruled that either all values on a line must be crossed out
before the player went on to the next line (simulating a six-card
suit), or that the player could choose from any of the 24 individual
"rolls", but must use up all 24 before they started using a fresh set
of 24 (simulating a 24-card suit).  Plenty of variations are possible,
of course. I call these "piecepack paper dice".

What say ye?  Please, no piecepack-versus-Icehouse flames.

Ron H-E

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/