Re: [piecepack] New piecepack components? Dice cards and paper dice

["Mike Schoessow" <mikeschoessow@...>]

I think a good addition to the piecepack product selection would be a set of fourteen more pawns, seven red and seven black. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, with eight pawns in two colors, many additional existing abstract games immediately become playable with piecepack. Secondly, design possibilities are opened up by having multiple pawns of one color. I have frequently wished for this when working on designs. Thirdly, this would be an easy addition to the product line of anyone already making piecepacks; they already have the pawns and must only make an inventory adjustment as sales pick up. Fourthly, packaging would be inexpensive. The choice of red and black for the colors would make the pawn expansion compatible with both the standard piecepack, as well as the playing card expansion. Also, black pawns could have some additional utility because black can usefully serve as a neutral color, in an esthetic sense, in some game designs.

To make the expansion even more useful, a possible addition would be a suit-selection die (one potential configuration would have faces of arms, moons, suns, crowns, wild, null), perhaps printed all in black to keep printing costs reasonable.

-Mike
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ron Hale-Evans 
  To: piecepack mailing list 
  Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 7:45 AM
  Subject: [piecepack] New piecepack components? Dice cards and paper dice


  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.