I really like my chip theory games dice tower. I got one themed around Hoplomachus in a recent backer campaign.
It is collapsible, has a nice felt lining so the dice have this satisfying thunk noise travelling down. Haven’t had any dice get stuck yet and it has had a fair bit of use.
I should add too, I’ve used this dice tower for Hoplomachus: Victorum and for Uprising: Curse of the Last Emperor. Half a dozen dice or more? No problems I’ve found. Worst case, I might get the occasional die not roll all the way out into the tray. Like it’ll end up on an edge as it exits the tower. I just reroll it.
While we’re on the topic of objects making the actions of playing a game easier or more fun: Is there a shuffling machine that works with cards of different sizes, ideally electric, that doesn’t destroy the cards in the long run? That would be heavensent.
Reporting for duty! I’m not usually electric, but perhaps if I can polish up some of my best material…
Oh, wait, you probably meant, like, a device you could buy.
I love shuffling cards! Absolutely love it. If there are cards that need shuffling, I’m on it. It never occurred to me that “too much shuffling” is an observation someone might make about a game! :)
Even mini sized decks? Decks of 150 cards that you can’t shuffle all at once, but have to do in sections then shuffle the sections together? I have a hand crack shuffler that I use only for big decks.
But, sure, point taken! I don’t have a lot of games that make shuffling onerous, but I concede they do exist. I was actually thinking of someone’s complaint about Onirim, which is a game comprised entirely of one big-ass deck of cards that you have to constantly shuffle over the course of playing a game. “Too much shuffling,” someone said about it online once, and I immediately thought, “Hmm, okay, I guess I can see it if you don’t like shuffling…”
But I maintain that while I would be annoyed at having to manage 150 minicards, I would probably be less annoyed than you or @Arioch. :) Shuffling is shuffling, even if you have to do it with six or seven separate handfuls. And ever since teaching myself to “throw shuffle” (I still don’t know what it’s actually called) during the pandemic, I can even handle minicards!
Honestly, it goes back to being a child and watching my mother shuffle playing cards when people came over and they were playing gin or spades or whatever adults in the South played at each other’s homes in the 70s. I have such vivid memories of my mother’s long thin worn nurse’s fingers taking up the cards, deftly splitting them into two piles, and then making them do that magical dance to become one pile again! To me, it was an Adult Thing, like having a wallet or going to a job or smoking a cigarette.
I love that. Sometimes the simplest things are so evocative. My family were cutthroat pinochle players and I have similar right-of-passage memories of being able to riffle shuffle.
Automatic card shufflers are fine for standard playing cards but not for boardgames for one main reason: they will eventually either score your cards with marks, or (more likely), they’ll eventually jam and mangle a couple of cards.
With playing cards, big whoop. You go to the Everything Drawer in your kitchen and bust open another $3 pack of cards. But with your $25-$100 boardgame (which may or may not be still in print), you kiiiinda don’t want that. :)
How does this “throw shuffle” thing work? I taught myself a kind of rifle shuffle that doesn’t damage the cards (doesn’t look elegant but mostly works).
During the pandemic, I was posting videos of whatever I had set up on the dining room table, and I know I recorded one where I triumphantly displayed my new “throw shuffle” skill and how I did it. I don’t recall if I titled the video accordingly, so I don’t recall how hard it would be to find, but if you can’t find my video, I’m sure there are a million others.
But what I explain is this: The trick is that you’re not “throwing” at all, but you’re “grabbing”; it just looks like throwing when you do it really fast. Once I understood that the real mechanism at work is your “receiving” thumb grabbing the cards, it was a simple matter to just do it faster and faster until, at a certain point, you’re “throw shuffling”!
I’m not sure if that helps, but that was the key to me finally figuring it out after 40+ years.
I found the video. That’s the overhand shuffle. That’s the way I used most of my life but I find it not very useful if you have a sorted deck and want to shuffle the sorting out of it. Now I use basically a mix of overhand and rifle (riffle?).
That’s what it’s called? Why would they name it after a tennis move??? :)
When it’s done quickly, it still looks so much like the cards are being thrown from one hand to another. One of these days, maybe I’ll learn that crazy thing where you “stream” a line of cards from one hand to the other. You know, the move that card sharps did in the Old West to demonstrate they’re card sharps. I wonder if that move has a name.
As of Saturday, it has come to my attention that Baltic and Mediterranean (the first two properties after you pass Go in Monopoly) are now brown and not purple.
I got roped into a last-minute babysitting gig by my niece and her husband on Saturday. But their daughters are an absolute riot, so I’m usually pretty easy to get in. :) We played Catan and a very heavily house-ruled Monopoly that I’m pretty sure stacked the deck against me.
I forgot I backed Agemonia a couple of years ago, but got my shipped notification a few weeks ago and it arrived last week. Still haven’t gotten a chance to do anything more than break the shrink on it and start poking through the manual and components. When it first arrived, I was like “Well, hell. This thing is basically Oathsworn all over again.” And to be sure, they share a LOT of DNA. But I think I’m going to be excited to jump in and play in a week or two when I can get to a good stopping point on a game of 7th Continent that I sort of spontaneously started up.
Warning: game has an app, though it is not required.
