When: Sunday, Feb 16, 2003, 8pm

Who: Me

Experience: The foremost expert on Tao Dice.

Notes:

I wanted to spend a little more time thinking about packaging and how the game sets themselves would live in the larger world.

I thought about how people would want to purchase the sets, and how they would carry them. This thinking showed me that it's very important to, within the store enviroment, be able to tell the color-pairs of the set you're buying (green die and yellow die, or red die and blue die, et cetera). Though the dice should be visible through the transparent endcaps of the tubes, the frosted tubes themselves should be frosted in the color of that player's D12 die. While it might be nice to color-match the 12mm D6 dice as well, this is less important than coloring the tubes.

Playing with tubes that are color-matched to the D12 dice, players can easily correlate the rolled die with its owner.

Also, while the 10" joined-tube makes for a nice presentation, it may not always be ideal for storage in smaller places. Alternative packaging, where two tubes screw in to a single connector, standing parallel to one another, would enable packing into a space only 5" tall by 3" wide, far more convenient for a purse or a small game case. Similarly, other 'hubs' might be made available, for connecting 4 or 6 single-player sets, or a single set. These are of lesser importance though, since a player could just as easily have 2 or 3 loose two-player sets and there's little value in forcing them to link together to a larger set for storage or transport.

Initially, I imagine three different sets, with unique color-pairs, to be available in stores. Each color would only appear in one set (so that green would only appear in the green-yellow set, for example) to minimize frustration that could arise when one player has a green-yellow set and another has a red-yellow set.

Later on, premium sets could be released with different, nicer dice. A 'dwarven set' with metal or stone dice, or a 'Borealis' set with high quality sparkling dice could be purchased. These might have similarly impressive tubes, with patterned frosted rolling tubes. These could be played joined with the basic sets, but would have an intrinsic value to the player that might justify them 'buying up' to the nicer set as their interest in the game grows.

Simplification of the Ante Multiplier Table - Instead of forcing players to reference the ante multiplier table (shown here), the same result can be achieved by instructing players to up the ante multiplier by one stone every time two players are eliminated from the game.