reports from the final California Gen Con...
There have been a plethora of activity sets lately, consisting of a small booklet and miscellaneous items wrapped in plastic netting, promising to grant you near-instantaneous mastery of juggling or magic tricks or brain surgery (OK, I made that last one up).
The one most useful to gamers would seem to be World's Greatest Dice Games, which - as you've probably guessed - comes with an 80-page digest-sized booklet, dice, and a dice cup, wrapped together in plastic mesh.
(Also available in some discount stores sold as two items - book and bag - as low as $1 USD each...)
Besides a brief history of dice and some dice terminology, the booklet includes rules for 30 dice games (plus variations). Beetle, for instance, takes the classic game of Hangman and turns it into a dice-driven beetle-drawing game. And Fifty Up is a game where the object is to score 50 points, only doubles count for points, but double-three's erase your score.
All that seems harmless enough, but the real problem is with the dice cup (and the dice). Instead of the usual cylindrical shape, this dice cup is flask-shaped - and so narrow that the large dice don't have much room to turn around. This makes it rather easy to "stack the odds" by the way you place the dice into the cup!
So if you thought this set was a cheap way to get a decent dice cup for wargaming (plus some dice games for the kiddies)... well, you'd be half-right.