While we have yet to create our own unboxing and reactions videos… we have always enjoyed doing it nonetheless as a family.
Even when the youngest member of the family was barely able to join us for most of the table top games, to get her feel involved – punching out the tokens from the board is almost always her “job” which she takes the utmost pride in doing!
Now that she’s grown and can join all her elder siblings at the table, we love opening a new game together and if necessary, we’ll do our part to do the punch-outs and also to sleeve the cards.
I like making mundane things fun by coming up with a simple game to pass the time, be it on long car rides or even out and about at the mall.
Recalling that have a booklet of vouchers and was going to be at Tampines Hub, to make walking around less boring, we turned it into a scavenger hunt of sorts. Ok, I confess, I came up with the idea to distract her from wanting to enter the toy shop around the corner.
We chose a few vouchers we could use today and off she went to hunt for the establishments depicted on the selected vouchers. Sure she can easily spot the shop/brand logo but when not within line of sight, we made use of the unit number on the voucher and the unit number of the shops closest to us to estimate how much further we had to walk. That in itself is the intangible skill of ‘estimation’. You may recall questions in our big stakes exam (PSLE) about the mass or height of a stack of coins (long before the Helen & Ivan saga).
Wherever possible, she reads the text on the voucher and choose the correct dollar bill to pay the lady at the counter.
At the end of the day, I got the pizza for her and the brothers at a discount and avoided several shops not on my list. I say, that’s a win for daddy today!
Aaaah… dice! One of the earliest and easily recognized game accessory of all time.
The six-sided (d6) is by far the most common one and would be the first many would picture in their mind at the mention of the word – dice.
However, games have evolved and we now gladly throw what we call ‘math rocks’ or ‘click clicks’ that range from being 2-sided (d2)…
or one with a hundred sides (the d100!) across the table.
You know how there are some women who likes to collect shoes, bags and whatever accessories to their fancy? Or how some men collect watches, wallets etc? Speak to some gamers and you’ll discover that there is such a thing as Dice Goblins. Chances are – they’ll be more than happy to whip out a photo of their rather impressing collection of dice.
In the classroom, dice has been used to teach Maths (obviously!) and even Language Arts. What’s more fun than throwing dice to do basic mathematical equations at primary school than rolling dice with friends, right? I’m willing to put money on guessing that if your English/Language teacher had brought in these storytelling cubes, it would have been one of the best writing activities you’d easily remember having fun the most during class.
The fact that the regular set of role playing dice comes in a variety of polygonal shapes, sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart. We use them regularly for our sessions, especially in out “Adventurer’s & Writers” enrichment sessions so we’re created a blog entry with their descriptions. We’ve uploaded a file, together with 3 suggested dice-games in the Products section of this website. It’s FREE for you to download – here!
Most of the dice are given names like d6 or d20. The ‘d’ is for dice and the ‘number’ refers to the number of faces / sides the dice has.
This four-sided often referred to as the d4. You typically read the number that is the right side up and oriented the right way.
This is a d4 – a tetrahedron
We all know this one… the six-sided cube – the d6.
cube
The eight-sided one is often referred to as – the d8.
octahedron
This d 10, is the ten-sided dice is the one with only single digits on each face.
deltohedron
There is another ten-sided dice but it’s the one with the double digits (00-90). We call this the PERCENTILE dice.
deltohedron
This dice is usually thrown together with the d10 to produce a ‘percentage’ result. The digits on the percentile dice represents values in the tens-place while the d10 digit is for the ones-place. It’s kind of tricky for newbies but we’ll try to give you some simple examples to explain;
This is the only way to get 100% and won’t count it as a 0% because… that would be mean.
Next, we have the twelve-sided dice that we call – the d12.
dodecahedron
Finally, the one where we roll the most during most RPGs… the 20-sided dice that determines the fates of many. That roll to see if your character does something heroically amazing, of he fails in epic proportions… both tales befitting to be recalled many times over as your group is bound to reminisce – the icosahedron – d20.
If you’re keen to try out some neat games involving this set of amazing math rocks, click THIS link to download the rules for 3 simple Maths games you can play with anyone.
There is an offer on Fruit Dice in our store too which will make cute gifts for children and probably your friend who’s a Math teacher. How did they put those tiny inserts in the cube?!
