It’s that time of year again… when my kids break out the dreidels and beg me to “play” the dreidel “game” with them.
But as a real gamer, married to a real gamer, trying to raise a family that enjoys real tabletop games, I shudder (much as I do when Candyland or Chutes and Ladders comes out), and hope my parents or sister will come over and humor them for me so we get Dreidel out of the way and can play Codenames or Ticket to Ride or something afterwards.
Has anyone taken the “classic” dreidel “game” and made a real game from it? Something ideally involving, like… some minimal decision making? or at least an illusion of choice? in other words, something not as completely and utterly random and pointless as War. (the card game, I mean, though one might argue the same applies to actual War.) It doesn’t have to be the next Agricola, just make me not want to shove the gelt up my nose until I pass out.
I mean, a dreidel is essentially a fancy d4. You’d think it could be used to drive a real game system, no? It’s a bit unwieldy to spin in multiples though, so something like Dreidel Yahtzee, while technically do-able, would be pretty tedious.
I think the “can’t-throw-multiples” thing is going to be a killer, here. There are plenty of interesting games you can play with multiple dice, even dice of an arbitrary number of sides. In fact, Liar’s Dice might actually be interesting with each player having a matched set of varied polyhedral dice (like, say, everyone having a pair of d4s, a pair of d6s, and a pair of d8s).
Get a bunch of them, and a piece of cardboard. Fashion the cardboard into a shield to cover four dreidls, and then you can play a form of Mastermind.
One person makes the “code,” with a pattern of letters, and shields it. The other person gets told that they have one correct in the correct spot, and one correct in the wrong spot (or whatever). Lay out the next guess, and go on. To keep track of the right/wrongs, just put a strip of paper next to the rows of dreidls. You can mark something like a + for a right letter/right place, and an o for a right letter/wrong place.
My cousins and I used to play this, starting one year, when, for some reason, we had a bucket of little plastic dreidls. They didn’t spin very well, but they were great for Mastermind.
I once went to a party where we played Texas Hold-em poker using dreidels. It was pretty lame, though. Texas Hold-em doesn’t really involve any more strategy than a regular game of dreidel, other than the betting component.
heh a Jewish teacher taught up all about Hanukah and dreidels and gave us a toy one … but I knew how they used them to gamble in the late 1800s so we did that with monopoly money …
