Shut the Box

The local Ding Te

a place had a new board game set up when we stopped by last weekend.  Previously, they had a variety of Jenga games and those hook and ring games I wrote about a while back.  This time it was Shut the Box, which I have seen before but never got to tinker with.

It was a square game board where each side had little wooden pegs marked 1 to 10, all set up so you can flip them up or down.  The game involves rolling the 2 dice and then flipping any combination of pegs that add up to the number rolled.  You keep rolling until you can't flip another peg, and then score the sum of the unflipped pegs.  Lowest scroes wins.  Aside from a few tiny extra rules like only rolling one die if the highest remaining peg is 6 or less, that's it for rules.

There was a nice big rulesheet printed and laminated, suggesting a few variations.  If you manage to flip all the pegs ("shut the box"), you win that round immediately.  I suppose you can keep a running score sheet.

It's so simple, it's just rolling and flipping and wondering if it will get interesting.  One could think of a tactic, I suppose, like flipping the highest pegs first, but it so heavily chance based, I'm not sure it will matter much.

What's funny is that when I was trying to sleep the next night (of course), I pictured how easy it would be to simulate this game at home with regular playing cards.  So Anne & I set up a line of Ace through 10 for each of us.  

Then we rolled the dice and flipped the cards instead of flipping pegs.  It felt the same, and again so simple it fizzled out after three or four rounds.  We also saw the game on the shelf at Target in the mall.  Probably $10 or $12 bucks.  There were people in the way at the time.  But, I suppose a variety of games can be made up with regular playing cards and some dice to roll.