The Games, History, and Life of Dice
–by Wayne Saunders
Dice are much more than randomizing agents in proprietary games, or even traditional gambling equipment. They are icons of fate in the way that CHESS is an icon of reason. In the right setting, they can even be a means of beating fate at its own game or of accepting it on its own terms. A “boxcar” of recent books on the subject shows just how much flesh can be found on these bare bones.
Best of the World’s Best Dice Games by Gil Jacobs (Millbrae, CA: John N. Hansen, 1998, vii + 205 pp., about $13) is a much-enlarged edition of at least two earlier ones, beginning with Come Up in 1976, exclusively about San Francisco bar dice games, and followed by World’s Best Dice Games, which added pictures and children’s games and foreign games and appeared everywhere, even as the centerpiece of different dice kits sold by Sears and by The John Hansen Company. The latest incarnation is a self-indulgent album of bar games (most notably BOSS DICE) and their terminology (such as “flop,” which they share with POKER), anecdotes, and atmosphere, but also children’s dice games, photos of equipment and tournaments and friends and Gil’s two sons (then and now), pages of names of people Gil has played with and bars he has played in, an illustrated dice filmography, and probability charts and basic strategies, all formatted clumsily and in some cases uselessly, as with the glossary-index that refers to chapters instead of page numbers, with the chapter numbers given in roman numerals and not listed in the table of contents. But the games are numerous and helpfully arranged and clearly explained, the scoring games come with copy-ready score sheets, the bar games are immersed in authentic descriptions of their liquid social context, and the old-new craze of BUNCO includes a history, hosting tips, and a photo of the all-female Sabinas Bunco League. You have to love a book that the author has loved enough to tinker with for more than a quarter of a century.
The Dice Stacking Book by Todd Strong (Point Roberts, WA: Perceptual Motion, 1998, 94 pp., $9.95) is more for magicians and entertainers than game players. Though the last two chapters provide a spotty, spoofy, and highly uncritical history of dice as gaming implements along with a few skill-and-action games that employ dice stacking, the bulk of the book concerns the “art of picking [scooping] up dice [lying on a table] in a dice cup and then setting the cup down on a table or countertop so the dice stay lined up one atop the other in a vertical column.” The descriptions and photographs appear adequate to the task at hand. But the historical chapter would seem out of place unless we remember how many other objects could be stacked instead of dice and meditate on the unnatural power one would appear to have if he could control these instruments of chance and fate. It is too bad the book is not deep enough to make the connection.
Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia (Lower Kingswood, Tadworth, Surrey, UK: Elliot Right Way Works, 2001, 224 pp., about $10) is probably the most thoughtful and complete how-to dice book ever written, including the several editions of John Scarne’s great Scarne on Dice. It can justify eliminating much of the bar and casino atmospherics associated with the games because it is done from the perspective of a mathematician and game designer, whose purposes serve the reader in their own way. Dr. Knizia has degrees in science and math from Germany and the United States and managed a large mortgage company in England before choosing to design games full-time. His more than one hundred published games include such classics as MODERN ART, MEDICI, and TIGRIS & EUPHRATES. But he thoroughly tests all of his games for balance and probability, and as dice games have always been for him a pure form of probability, they constitute for him a special interest to which he occasionally devotes special labors. Knizia has admitted to arising at 4:00 AM every day for several months to work compulsively on the book that purports to “explain responsibly.” It is as careful in typing the kinds of dice games as David Parlett’s books are in the kinds of card games, as both authors show more interest in the mechanics of the games themselves than in their social settings or players. Thus the requisite and accessible chapter on probability theory follows the chapters on simple counter and scoring games that do not require that knowledge, and is itself followed by chapters on games that do: betting and casino games (KLONDIKE and CRAPS), “jeopardy” games, category games (YAHTZEE, THIRTY-SIX), progression games (POKER DICE), and bluffing games (LIAR DICE). Several of the almost 150 games are of Knizia’s own invention, some being improvements on existing games and others completely original. Reviewers tend to agree that the book is one of the great bargains in games literature.
Advantage Yahtzee by Olaf Vancura, Ph.D. (Las Vegas: Huntington Press, 2001, x + 154 pp., $6.95) is a small-format, large-print, generously-diagrammed, user-friendly guide to making the optimal score in the popular Milton Bradley/Hasbro proprietary game. All strategy is based on an incredibly complicated statistical analysis first worked out by the author, a former astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, then a teacher of casino gambling at Tufts University, and now Director of Gaming Products at Mikohn Gaming. He is also the author of one of the standard works on card counting in BLACKJACK. But BLACKJACK is serious stuff, and this book, too, is full of numbers and charts, since, like any good teacher, Vancura is not content to list some helpful rules of thumb, but insists on explaining to the reader—who, for heaven’s sake, just wants a leg up at the family gathering—why all this works. But the pages are small, the print is big, the diagrams are numerous, and the text is free of any jargon that might increase the otherwise small amount of patience needed to follow the author’s reasoning. Even so, Vancura is forced to pare down the mathematically precise “optimal strategy” to something he calls a “basic strategy,” which, as he says, can be followed “by mere mortals.” For all the numbers and graphs, Advantage Yahtzee looks suspiciously like other how-to gambling books that regularly pour out of Las Vegas’s more gifted mathematicians. And, in fact, closer inspection shows the little book to be only one in a series of “gambling-related books and periodicals” distributed by this Vegas publisher. Why all the attention to a little table game? Because there are tables and then there are tables. The project began as an attempt by Mikohn Gaming to adapt YAHTZEE “to the casino environment,” and high-level discussions were even held with Hasbro (pp. 25-29), though the outcome was not herein reported. We can wonder if the game’s suitability to gambling is not more than coincidental when we read (p. 2) that Edwin S. Lowe, family game publisher and YAHTZEE’s first owner (1954), also owned Las Vegas’s first non-casino resort, the Tallyho, which lasted only a year until in 1963 it was closed and replaced by the Aladdin.
The Book of the Die by Luke Rhinehart, pseudonym of George Cockcroft (Woodstock and New York: Outlook Press, 2002, xxvi + 325 pp., $25.95) is really a sort of second sequel to a cult classic that appeared over thirty years earlier. The Dice Man, published in England by HarperCollins in 1971 and released again, along with its 1994 sequel, The Search for the Dice Man, in 2000, has been available in this country from Overlook Press since 2001 (431 pp., $15.95), more or less to catch the wave of renewed interest that has far exceeded the book’s original “mild success.” A major television documentary on the book and its influence was filmed in England in 1999 and subsequently shown worldwide. “The Diceman Travel Show” television series about two Englishmen wandering throughout the world on the whims of dice throws has been broadcast not only in Europe, but on the Travel Channel in this country as well. At least three recent plays were Dice Man-inspired. Movies are being proposed. All because of the original Rabelaisian tale of a jaded Manhattan psychiatrist who finds himself unable to sunder the bonds of meaningless social institutions until he substitutes the device of letting one or two dice make all of his decisions. That the ensuing decisions have ribald and psychedelic consequences surely only helps sell a book that has a much more serious nihilistic message. And yet it is religious, too, since depending on the fate of a die throw is far closer to the oracular tradition than it is to Nietzsche’s self-creating Superman. The Book of the Die, in fact, moves toward the oracular end of the spectrum, as it is little more than a compendium of “proverbs, parables, quotations, illustrations, poems, meandering essays, scenes from movies . . .” sorted into twenty-one sections corresponding to the different throws possible with two dice. The reader is invited to throw his own dice and be his own Dice Man, or at least to read the snippets of wisdom and free himself up for their unscheduled and seditious revelations. Such a source appeared as a shadow-scripture, though more like a character than a canon, in the edgier Dice Man itself, where we read, for instance: “Surely goodness and mercy and evil and cruelty shall follow me / All the days of my life: / And I will dwell in the house of Chance for ever. –from The Book of the Die.”
Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck by Ricky Jay, photographs and afterword by Rosamond Purcell (New York: W.W. Norton, distributing for The Quantuck Lane Press, 2003, 64 pp., $12.95) sports as long an explanation for its existence as the book is short: “Ricky Jay asked his friend Rosamond Purcell to photograph and commemorate his crumbling collection of dice. The result is a series of remarkable photographs that inspired Mr. Jay’s composition on decomposing dice” (from the dust jacket). The dice are crumbling because they are made of unstable celluloid invented in 1868 as a substitute for bone, ivory, horn, and tortoiseshell and widely used for dice for almost a hundred years. The cracked and powdery cubes are nonetheless prized because they are part of a collection assembled and owned by Jay, one of the great sleight-of-hand artists, curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring, author of Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, and actor in, among other movies, “House of Games.” Purcell is not only Jay’s friend but a professional photographer who specializes in visually preserving the degenerating artifacts found in the back rooms of museums. (Her part of the book is dedicated to the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould.) One look at Purcell’s eighteen or so full-page color compositions of dice, stacked and flaking and crystallizing and warping and reflecting the light, and the reader will be tempted to pick up his own pen. Jay’s twelve two- and three-page meditations—on ancient loaded and fair dice, ancient dice games and craps, hustling, dice in classical literature, oddities, punishments for cheating, tall tales, and Jay’s fascination with his disintegrating collection—for the most part use the photos as a starting point from which to talk of other things. Purcell’s own words at the end zero in on the visual qualities of the pictures themselves and from there to the objects that inspired her to make them.
