Fiber Fool

We enjoy games around these parts and I always have (see Tuesday’s post for proof). We play all sorts of games from some of the classic Cheap Ass games to involved games like Arkham Horror. We enjoy playing classics from time to time like Backgammon and Drew is a big fan of Go. Several years ago we were told about a build-your-own card game called 1,000 Blank White Cards (1kBMC). We introduced it to our game playing friends and it was a hit.

The basic premise of 1kBWC is that you build your own deck cards, traditionally from index cards cut in half. 1/3 of the deck are already drawn cards from a “seed deck” of previous games that were voted to be carried forward by that game’s players, 1/3 of the deck is drawn before dealing the cards and a 1/3 are blank cards and drawn as the game progresses. If it is your first 1kBWC game you’ll just draw 2/3 of the deck before the cards are dealt.

If you’ve ever played Flux, that is kind of how this works. Each card must have a title and drawing on it and either a point value or an action that applies to either an individual or the table as a whole. Once the entire deck has been played the game is over and the winner is the person with the most points - that is unless someone draws a card that changes those rules!

For Christmas this year gifts were optional and if done were to be homemade. I don’t know about you, but men can be hard to gift to anyway, let alone with the restriction of it being homemade. And our preserves were going to the women. We didn’t know if all the men played games, but we knew a few did. So, I designed a little logo for 1,000 Blank White Cards that we had printed on business cards. Then I created a little rule book that is the same size of the business cards so it can be stored with them. Put together, we gave people 500 cards to start their 1kBWC decks. That should be enough for many games as the deck is usually made up of 15 cards per player.

Well, I went to all the work and we’re not likely to get to make use of it again anytime soon. It seemed a bit of a waste of time and creative energy. That was until I realized I could share it! So you can download the cards and/or the rule book and create your own 1000 Blank White Card set for yourself or gifting. The cards should print on business card paper, though I recommend you test it on plain paper and hold it up to bright light with your business card paper to double check. You can also print the cards on heavy cardstock and cut them to size with a paper cutter.

The rule book is two pages that need printed back to back. Instructions on how to cut and fold the book are included in the file. I recommend a slightly heavier bond of standard printer paper. Cardstock is a bit too stiff for nice clean folding, but too light of a paper doesn’t hold the creases as well and you can sometimes have text bleed through.

While we’ve only played the game with adults, I think this would be a great game for the whole family. Since you create it as you go it can be created to suit the individual players. In fact, we discovered if you play with two drastically different groups of people it is nice to have a seed deck for each type of group.

If I’m ever stuck for card ideas I like to draw on pop culture references - song lyrics, movie quotes, famous books or characters. Others like to draw upon other game actions they can think of. Above are a few sample cards from our seed deck.

Well, what are you waiting for? Start drawing and playing!

• Download the 1000 Blank White Card template
• Download the 1000 Blank White Card Rule Book template

Saturday night DH and I and several other friends gathered together at Scimoria (a house owned and rooms rented out to several of our friends) for a murder mystery party. Tam’s parents have played several and know which ones are good ones and which aren’t and they gifted Tam a copy of An Affair to Dismember a part of the “How to Host a Murder” series.

The premise of An Affair to Dismember is that Lizzie Bordeaux and Neville Aster-Night throw an engagement party on Halloween. They’ve invited an interesting cast of halloween-ish characters - a mummy, a frankenstien-like monster, a clairvoyant, a deadly dentist, a depressed witch, The Prince of Dimness, and a kosher canibal. Each character was given an invite with the bios of all the other characters on it so we knew a little bit going in.

Following a dinner peppered with some off the cuff in-character banter we were presented with books and the left side of each spread contained information we were not to freely offer up about ourselves and the right side contained information we were supposed to bring light to about the other characters. At first I thought the party was going to be a dud. The first two spreads of the book contained info on how to use the book and then the same bio we had all gotten in our invites. Even round one seemed a little forced and slow. But, as clues about each other surfaced we seemed to get a bit carried away and were arguing, fibbing, evading questions, and what not for some very exciting exchanges of clues that were vital to solving the mystery.

Now, a few people took the idea of not giving up the information on their left hand pages a bit too far. It said to not lie, though you could try to change the subject and one of the more competitive persons present lied on at least a few occassions. Nevertheless, we all had come quite close to solving the mystery, though they threw in some twists and turns and we couldn’t quite make the complete picture work because a few of the neccessary clues had remained unrevealed.

Overall it was a lot of fun. It didn’t require too much acting. The fact that it was Halloween themed made the costumes pretty easy. You do need a certain mix of people it seemed - a few who are out-spoken and a few who fade into the background a bit so that there isn’t a room of 8 people all trying to speak at once. You don’t want anyone too competitive or too much information will remain secret, making it impossible to figure out the mystery. We did run into a problem of not knowing everything about our own characters before it started and ad libbing stuff that was later contridicted as we learned more in following rounds.

I was Angela Deth, DDS. A dentist known to put her patients six feet under. I had fun with the costume. It was pretty easy. Just go kind of goth, but professional. Add a lab coat and a badge (to differentiate myself from medical doctors). Do some angel of death make-up and I was ready to go. I did a little more to make it obvious that I was a dentist rather than an MD, but I’ll share that tomorrow. I was quite pleased with myself because Scott told me that while everyone was to be a little scary I was really the only one that was very scary. He said I was very convincing as a scary dentist! Yeah! :-) LOL!

DH and I are thinking about throwing one for New Years Eve (perhaps one between now and then as well so we can try out the different styles). There is talk of trying a more free form one that would require a bit more work on the hosting side and more acting. With those there is less hand holding as to what needs revealed and when, but we’d get dossiers up front that reveal everything we need to know about our characters. That would prevent some of the contradictory ad libbing that occurred this time. Then again, we may go with something a little more laid back. Who knows! But we’ll certainly do a murder mystery party again!

If you are in the area and think you’d enjoy something like this let me know. We’re thinking it would be best to mix up the guest list a little from time to time with some fresh people.

Last year we used to gather at the home of several of our friends every Wednesday for a game night. We break into appropriately sized groups and play various board or card games. Often our games chosen were lesser known such as Chez Geek, Fluxx, Apples to Apples (gaining popularity now), or various Cheap Ass Games. Well, the group grew to crazy proportions and often included people who wished only to sit and play on their laptops and argue for their friends in games they weren’t actually playing so it went on hiatus.

This week, DH and I kind of brought it back. Mim had posted about playing this DIY card came, 1000 Blank White Cards, a few weeks ago and I sent the link around and it seemed many were interested. So, this Wednesday we had a 1KBWC night. Scimon, G, and T joined us for the inaugural game.

If you can’t tell from the sampling of the cards to the left there, we had a blast! Indeed, the game is much more about the playing and drawing than the actually winning. Surprisingly three of the six ended up with final point totals very near each other! While the drawing is a big part of it, you need no fancy drawing skills. You are often under a bit of time pressure to get a card made before your turn comes back around so no one is judging your drawing skills. We were also amazed by the number of ideas for cards that game to us by the time the game was over. We all enjoyed it so much we’ve set up another evening of play for next Wednesday.

Basically, you start with a deck of cards that are roughly 1/3 blank (unless it is your first round, in which case it is 2/3 blank and 1/3 cards that everyone made before the game begins). Each turn you pick a card from the deck and then play a card. If you can’t play a card you draw an extra and the game proceeds to the next player. You play until the draw pile is gone and someone can no longer play. Then you total up points of the cards played in front of you. Cards can be played on yourself, other playes, or on the table. You of course get to draw new cards if you have blanks in your hand and drawing good new cards to counteract cards already laid on the table is a good thing. At the end of the game you lay all the cards out and all the players chose a certain number of cards that they like and you keep those to use in the next game.

I’m looking forward to playing with a variety of people and developing a varied deck that contains cards from everyone we’ve played with!

Besides playing games I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading. I’ve been visiting the local library almost weekly. I think the heat has really dragged me down. I’m roasting and lethargic and sometime rather headachey so there has been a lot of reading going on. I’ve sort of abandoned the idea of reading books from my childhood. I’ve been much more drawn to the whodunits recently. Especially since I’ve found new and interesting mystery authors to read. There is just something about summer that means mystery reading to me.

I finished the second William Kent Krueger novel from the Cork O’Conner series, Boundary Waters. That was just as good as the first. As usual it was set near a native american reservation and casino in northeastern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters. There was a lot of outdoorsmanship to this book which I enjoyed since I have spent some time in that area of Minnesota. And, for anyone who has read his books, you know how he acknowledges the St. Claire Broiler all the time (and I believe set Devil’s Bed there)? My cousin has worked there for several years and I ate there once and there was a guy sitting there writing. I wonder if it was him?!?!?!?

I now have his third in the series up next, Purgatory Ridge, that I’ll be starting today.

I then read a more recent John Sandford (another Minnesota author), Broken Prey. This book has a detective for the state crime office working out of Minneapolis, but the majority of the action took place about an hour south of the metro area near Austin, Minnesota. It was kind of fun because we drove through that area on our trip a few weeks ago. I have been reading this series completely out of order though. My mom recommended a specific one from this series for me to see if I liked him. I don’t recall which Prey book it was, but it had something to do with art. Then when I went to the library to check this one out they were pretty sketchy on which ones were on the shelf and I didn’t find the first few of the series so I just drew this one at random.

As is usual for this series, this book dealt with a serial killer. I enjoyed it, though there were times where it seemed like it was a bit of a commercial as he was always naming things by their brand name - his Lexus Pick Up and his navigation system this and that. It seemed as though Sandford was getting kick backs from some companies. I do not know if it was true, but I could care less what make and model vehicle he is driving and whether or not he uses a navigation system or what type of cell phone he has. That said, I will certainly continue to read him. I would like to go back and start the series from the beginning though I think. I’ll probably put the first few on hold here in a few days time.

After Sandford I decided it was time to switch to a Colorado author. I had heard many good things about Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries but I had never heard that she was a Colorado author until a few ladies in my water aerobics and I started swapping authors and mystery series to read. So, I checked out her first two novels from the library last weekend and plowed through both this week. Catering to Nobody was obviously a first novel. Some of the elements of Goldy’s life were heavy handed and a bit overdone by the end of the book. But, I liked the touch of romance thrown in and the food of course is a fun element. I do dislike how they put the recipes in though. I wish they would insert them at the end of a chapter or even just put them in the back of the book like they do with Joanne Fluke. Here they often interrupt a sentence or a paragraph and I find that distracting. But, then I’m a reader who much prefers to put a book down between chapters.

Dying for Chocolate, the second Davidson novel featuring Goldy Bear the caterer was much improved. There are definitely strong elements of being a single divorced mother raising a tween boy alone and dealing with an abusive ex, but it wasn’t nearly as heavy handed as in the first book. I really liked the twists at the end of the book even though I saw them coming. Oh, and some of her descriptions of chocolate were amazing! I’ll definitely be continuing this series!

I am going to try to keep mixing all these series up. Partly because most of these more recent series are still in progress and I hate having read all the books in a series and awaiting the next installment. Plus, it is nice to mix up the series so you don’t get annoyed by an author’s idiosyncrasies or that.

I will likely be heading over to the library again tomorrow so if you have any other mystery series you recommend (they need not be Minnesota or Colorado authors) please leave me a comment as my mother and I both love finding new authors to read.