obfuscated.org

The rules of Bingo Scrabble, such as they are:

• Every play must be a bingo
• Normal dictionary rules do not apply. (That is: words may not be challenged)
• Definitions for each word must be provided
• Score is not kept
• Everybody wins

I love games, but I hate dice. They vex me so. Especially while playing Settlers of Catan. If you’re twice as likely to roll a seven as you are a four, then why in the hell has four come up five turns out of the last six? Etc etc. You get the idea.

Inspired by Erich’s dice-by-cards Catan variant (and also by not having a spare deck of playing cards, and also by having recently taken pictures of a six-sided die) I put together Fair Dice. It’s a goofy little JavaScript application that will roll all thirty-six combinations of two dice once in random order. When it’s done, it will do it again.

Now, is this sort of thing useful? Who knows. Probably half the fun of a game like Settlers is watching people fume when threes and elevens come up over and over and over again while those sixes and eights that they so wisely choose at the beginning of the game go fallow. So you know me: I like to destroy fun.

A random non-gaming aside: How do people write web pages without FireBug? I looked briefly at making sure that this works correctly on IE and Safari, and I couldn’t tell what in the world was going on. For the longest time the page didn’t do anything because apparently Safari and IE (IE 6, at least) don’t understand the “const” keyword in JavaScript. Infuriating! Anyway, if you’re having to contend with JavaScript, I can’t recommend FireBug quite enough.

(Fair Dice)