“You are one ugly motherfarkle.”
Farkle is a game that exists. It is fun. You should play it.
Yahtzee is also a game that exists. It is fun. You should play it.
That’s it. Bing bing bong. Thank you very much, goodbye.
Not really. I just don’t have a whole lot to say this week/don’t have a whole lot of time/don’t have a whole lot of motivation, but I refuse to break this streak of over two hundred blogs posted every week for, like, four years. It has now worked its way into my head and ingrained itself there, this dogs-forsaken thing, this blog. It is now officially an OCD habit and I cannot stop it. I convince myself that it is worth continuing. I convince myself that it is helpful to me. I convince myself that, one day, it will amount to something. I do not know which is the biggest lie.
But enough about that! This weekend, I spent many days with friends and family celebrating our time together and the shared American tradition of glorifying genocide Thanksgiving. And what better way to spend that time together than playing dice games? Yes, this is basically just a rerun of that Uno post I did earlier this year, and for the exact same reasons. Besides that, Cheyenne’s dad asked me to include Farkle in my next blog post. Libby also requested a cameo. Now they’re both here! Hurray for this dubious achievement/honor/denigration?
I mean, what did you want me to write about this week? I’ve got stuff planned for later on, and sure, I could write about Thanksgiving and its weirdo history and the also-weirdo history of turkeys as a game bird, but we don’t have time to unpack all of that. So Farkle it is!
I first learned Farkle from Cheyenne’s family some time ago, and it’s a pretty good game! I enjoy it. It is, in fact, very much like Yahtzee, which is why I’m including them both here. Yahtzee is the older game, existing in a branded form since the 1950’s at least, reaping the post-war American prosperity at the expense of every future generation and buying an obscene amount of microwave ovens, but Farkle is like the younger cousin, born in the 80’s, presumably at a roller rink to a pair of dice wearing enormous hair and bickering about the inherent right-ness of trickle down economics and the use of space lasers against those commie bastards. Although both likely date back to much older folk dice games, such as ones based on Poker Dice. Did you know Poker Dice existed? I didn’t, and yet I have a set of six antique ones that, in a barbarous turn, may or may not be made out of the tusks of elephants. Somewhere, George Orwell weeps quietly and spins in his grave.
For those of you who have never played Farkle or Yahtzee, both are games that revolve around the player rolling dice and strategically choosing which ones to keep and which ones to reroll for several subsequent rolls in order to score the most points by making sets, or “hands,” of dice. I’ve never thought about it this way until Wikipedia pointed it out, but in a strange manner, they are both very similar to the “hit me/stay” dynamic of Blackjack, sort-of Texas Hold ‘Em, and similar hand-building card games. That, of course, also makes no sense if you don’t know how to play card games. But let’s just go with this; you roll dice, you can choose to keep some or reroll them, and you score points based on different combinations of dice. Easy enough.
But it’s the risk/reward aspect of the games that is both where the two games diverge and where they draw their separate appeal (in my opinion). See, in Yahtzee, you have to choose a hand to take each round, no matter what. Including the option of discarding a hand for zero points, if you really fuck up your rolls. And you can’t use the same hand twice. This gives you a limited number of chances to score really high-point hands, like six-of-a-kind (or the titular “YAHTZEE!” hand), but could also force you to throw out your chance of rolling that same statistically-unlikely high-scoring hand in favor of playing it slow and steady.
Farkle hinges on a similar “go for broke?” mentality. Every time you roll the dice, you have to take one dice to score points. This could be as simple as a one-pip die being worth 100 points, or something like that same six-of-a-kind roll. But now at the end of each roll, you have the option to reroll unselected dice to try and score more points. But if you roll a hand that you cannot take any points from, you “farkle” and lose all those points. So there’s that decision of “do I try to go for one more die and get bonus points or quit while I’m ahead” that has to be made every time you roll the dice. Between the inherent excitement and luck of rolling dice and the kinds of odds and statistics you have to run real quick in your head each time, It’s quite interesting, really. If you’re lucky enough, you can keep rolling for several hands and rack up several thousand points on a single turn, or you can lose it all.
It’s those choices that add a layer of strategy and quantitative decision-making to games that would otherwise be just throwing cubes at a table. If you ask me, what makes a game of any variety interesting, be it board game, card game, dice game, video game, et cetera, is the number and complexity of choices that the player can make at any given time. Finding that balance can be difficult, sure, and there’s different levels of complexity for different times and players. A friend of mine once tried to teach me Terra Mystica immediately after a memorial service. That game looks like a fucking nightmare, like he had opened up a historical atlas and threw a bunch of Lord of the Rings trading cards all over it, and then added the distilled essence of my economics professor’s hair clippings for good measure, and I was not having it. In that situation, I think Farkle would have been just fine. Nothing against Terra Mystica, but, uh, I was not in the right time or place for that.
Anyway, not much of a review there, but those are my thoughts on Farkle and Yahtzee and their game mechanics. I like both games. I enjoy playing them. They are both worthy ways to pass time with friends and family. What more do you want from me? If you’re reading this when it posts on Tuesday, I’ll hopefully be hunkered down in my apartment, waiting out a winter storm and not trapped in a ditch on the side of the road. I mean, I’m basically preparing for the bi-weekly Minnesota apocalypse on the edge of the Great American Siberia. Cut me some slack and I’ll see you next week.
