LCR Redux... Maybe?

You may have come across a simple dice game, usually known as LCR, or Left-Centre-Right (or, for that matter, Never Say Die, which was the version I was introduced to as a kid).  The idea is that there are three dice (usually three, anyway), each of which has three faces that are either blank or have dots on, while the other three sides bear markings to indicate 'left', 'centre' and 'right' respectively.  Each player starts with a pile of chips (or money, if you are feeling saucy) and, in turn, rolls the three dice.  Blank faces (or dots) do nothing, but the letters indicate whether to pass a chip to the player on the left or right, or into the middle of the table.  The last player with chips remaining is the winner -- and, if money is at stake, claims the central pot.

I have a fistful of LCR dice, acquired several years ago,
that have stars instead of "centre" for some reason.

This can actually be quite fun,  although, as you can see, there is no element of player skill or choice involved in the game.  You just sit there, roll dice and shuffle chips around, and then somebody eventually wins.  The neat idea is that the flow of chips to the centre means that the game steadily moves towards an end (on average, a chip should go to the centre on every other player's turn) and won't get stuck in endless chip shuffling. The other neat idea is that even when you are out of chips, there is a chance someone will pass you one and you will be back in the game.

I have been thinking about this and wondering how I could build on the basic idea of LCR to create something that actually functions as a game, with actual player choices to make.  This clearly doesn't need deep decisions: I would want to keep the fast flowing nature of the original, but if each player had at least one choice to make each turn, it would be great.

So, some general thoughts on this...

• Perhaps, instead of passing chips around, it is dice that get passed.
• Or dice and chips.
• There could be multiple coloured dice and one of the objectives could be to collect a set of one colour.
• I prefer to not rely on colour, but sometimes it can't be helped -- and anyway, as this game would require custom dice, there could be a shape on each face to help with differentiation.
• Maybe a real-time element, with more than one player able to be rolling dice at any given time.
• A real-time part to the game can substitute for decision making (at least to a point) as the game effectively becomes partly a dexterity game. 
• Possible decisions to make:
• How many, and which dice to roll at any given time.
• Who to pass dice or chips to.
• Trying to collect sets of dice faces.
• When to "bank" something.
• Taking an action to end the game, and timing when to do that.
• Whichever way, I think the game should have (most of) the simplicity and pace of the original.

Not really getting any closer to turning this into something, but I figure that if I at least write some of this down and publish it, it might be more likely that I do further work with it. That said, the amount of game ideas over the years that I have posted about once or twice but didn't go anywhere are extremely numerous.

Just for a bit of fun though, the dice themselves suggest some alternate uses -- and thank you to assorted Twitter people for bouncing more ideas around. For instance...

• Dice with "left", "right" and "★" (as well as the colours) on them might suggest a fighting/boxing game, either battling another player or trying to defeat "opponents" represented by cards.
• ...Or maybe something with a "Space Invaders" vibe, either with a similar mechanism as the boxing idea or with space ships actually moving on a board.
• ...Or some other retro-arcade type game, like the ones where you are trying to follow a winding path or dodge oncoming obstacles.
• ...Or Tug-of-War, with a rope being pulled left and right.
• ...Or something related to Twister. I think there is already a dice-based Twister game you play with your fingers -- but right now I can't be bothered to research.
• ...Or even a Yahtzee-style set collection game. Mind you, that is pretty much an option with any type of dice.

So there, a post with no conclusions or anything actionable. I'll think on this some more and write again if anything comes up. Input welcome! 😀

Making Faces in nanDECK

The other day I was working on a game in Screentop, and decided that I wanted the dice I had in it to be spotty dice rather than the digit dice that are the default. All this requires is uploading an image which shows the required faces (this works for any custom faces). If my image has a transparent background, then you can set the fill colour for the die to be whatever you want and then use the same image for a range of different coloured dice.

I figured that nanDECK would be an effective way of constructing the image, and it didn't take long to make the script. I thought I would share my script here as a kinda worked example. I'll break the sections of the script down with discussion about what each section does.

So, here goes...

BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0,MARKDOT

PAGE=21,29.7,PORTRAIT,HV

These lines are just boilerplate stuff that I put at the top of all my scripts, formatting a page for printing or creating a PDF at A4 size, with crop lines added. It's not necessary for what I am doing here, but I left them in anyway.

DPI=200

CARDSIZE=5,5

The next bit of the boilerplate, but a bit that I modify as necessary. My usual card size is 6.3 x 8.9 cm for poker-sized cards, but I want squares this time. As I am just making an image, the size doesn't really matter, so 5 cm square was just a convenient number.

[DotColour]=#000000

[CircleColour]=#999999

[TransparencyColour]=#ffbbff

It can be useful to define variables rather than using numbers in the guts of the code. Specifically the [DotColour] one meant that I could run the script once to generate an image with black dots, and then change the value (to #ffffff) in order to run again and output white dots.

The [TransparencyColour] is helpful because in nanDECK you can define a specific colour to be replaced by transparency in an output PNG file. As long as you select a colour you don't want to use in the actual image (I'm using a pink here), all is good.

RECTANGLE=,0,0,100%,100%,[TransparencyColour],[TransparencyColour]

So this is just filling the "card" with a solid background field of the colour I selected for the transparency.

ELLIPSE="1,3,5",2,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",0.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",3.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",3.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",0.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",0.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",3.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

That's the guts of it. You can look at a standard spotted die face as having seven locations where spots can exist, and each spot is present on some faces, so this sort of arrangement does the job.

It's worth noting that this is just outputting images for faces, without any thought about where on the die those faces are placed. For instance, the standard die arrangement of opposite faces adding up to seven is not covered here, but at present, Screentop appears to simply treat a die as a randomiser, with no physical analogue, so this point is irrelevant for my current use case.

DISPLAY="dottydice.png",1,6,3,,[TransparencyColour]

And that last line outputs the six faces to a single PNG image, three "cards" wide, converting the colour we specified earlier to transparency.

And here's the output:

Black on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

And, as an alternative, re-running the script with the white version of [CircleColour] gives:

White on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

I don't know if this sort of thing is helpful or interesting, but here it is anyway.