Game 115: Liar's Dice

Prior to the pandemic our family - my parents, my brother, and the four of us from this household - had a tradition of getting together once a week for dinner and a game.  Typically we played a few hands of Rook.  Then, due to the COVID pandemic, we didn't get together at all for a very long time.  But as the months went on we found a way to gather safely.  (With my parents getting on in years it has been important to us to make sure they are "sheltered," which we're still doing our best to maintain, but all the intense sheltering was killing my extrovert father, and I get the sense he'd rather die of COVID than be deprived of company.)  Anyway, we now get take-out pizza, eat at separate tables, and play a game that works well while distancing: Liar's Dice.  This isn't a "packaged" game, but given the amount of shelf space taken up by such things as dice and packs of standard playing cards it's only fair that I count these as games in some way.

In order to play, we all have five standard 6-sided dice in a cup.  We shake them up and flip the cup upside-down.  We can only look at our own dice.  We go around taking turns making "predictions" about how many faces of a certain kind are showing.  Ones are wild and count as whatever number is said or called.  Each successive person has to increase the amount or the number by at least one each turn.  In other words, if the last person said, "Four twos," the next person can say, "Four threes" (or "Four fours" or Four fives" or "Four sixes"), but if you want to go with a face value of two or below you have to call five (or more) of that number: "Five ones" or "Five twos."  Obviously at some point there's kind of a cut off where there can't possibly be that many of a certain value.  You can raise the number or you can call the person preceding you a liar.  Whoever is wrong - the one making the claim or the one calling the person a liar - loses one die and begins the next round; everyone shakes their cups and begins again.  The longer you play, the fewer dice there are, so the riskier everything is.  Once you run out of dice, you're out of the game.  The last person with dice remaining is the winner of the round.

We're using cups from a restaurant that was a favorite of ours when our kids were young. We still have the kid cups!  Sadly, the location in our area closed down, but if I'm ever in a town where there is an Acapulco I'll be sure to eat dinner there and get their sizzling chicken fajita.  (David's favorite was arroz con pollo, and we all loved their salsa!)

As you can see in pictures from previous posts, we love dice, and we certainly have dice that are more exciting than the old d6s, but this is quite a good game, and it has served us well for distanced play during the pandemic.

Actually, we've thought about playing with d20s.  We'll see.  For now we'll stick with the good old d6s.

I noticed as I updated my "List" post that it's been since August 21 that I updated this blog.  That is 3 months.  It's a quarter of a year!  That is a ridiculously long time to not have played a "new" game.  Since I've already put so much personal information in this post I'll just share this as well - as a teacher who had always taught 100% face-to-face (never a hybrid class, never made use of online interfaces of any kind) and has had to shift entirely to remote teaching this semester I have been averaging somewhere around 12 hours per day of work 7 days a week for the last 15 weeks.  I'm a veteran teacher of 34 years and very good at what I do, but this semester is straight-up killing me - for so many reasons and in so many ways.  It's awful!  (And that's no lie!)