Week Thirty-Six: Fifty Party

Cokesbury maybe possibly hints that some of your more conservative guests might, well, have a problem with this party, as it involves (whisper) dice. Personally, I’ve never understood why some people are shy of dice. What are they aside from being black-and-white polyhedral objects used in a wide variety of games?

Well, there’s the Flanders View:

Lisa: Where are the dice?
Todd: Daddy says dice are wicked.
Rod: We just move one space at a time. It's less fun that way.

But Cokesbury, ever-faithful to the faithful set, offers this delightful anti-dice workaround:

If it is not desirable to use dice, cubes can be made at small expense from wood. Any mill could make them out of wood. Gum wood cut into blocks three-quarters inch square could be painted white with black figured on them. For fifty cents any mill would make as many as twenty-five of these, but of course would not paint them. It is not even necessary to have them painted, and the figures could be printed on with ink [or] have figures printed on them corresponding to the numbers on a dice.

In other words, if your friends are uncomfortable with playing with dice, make some cubic, black-and-white dice-like objects. But they’re not dice. Having these dice-like objects manufactured, painted and stamped to look like dice doesn’t make them dice, per se, or . . . okay, they’re dice. Tell your dice-hating friends either to suck it up, or to stay away from the party or go play with the Flanderses.

Gum wood, Cokesbury advises, is the best wood to use for making your anti-dice dice:

It will be found that in using a wood block, made from gum wood, it is almost impossible to drop the block even a distance of three inches without having it turn over.

You may learn many, many, many more of the qualities of gum wood by visiting this site, populated by a man – or at least a clip art – that resembles Harrison Ford with a Walter Matthau nose:

I’m told this is Gustav Stickley, a name you would certainly anticipate going with a mug like that. Mr. Stickley is credited with being a “leading spokesman of the American Craftsman movement,” which explains his overt fascination with gum wood.

Let me back up a little here. Several paragraphs about dice for this party, and I haven’t even explained why you need them. It’s because you’re going to play a money-making dice game – Cokesbury doesn’t express any concern about you sponging your guests for money with a dice game, note – and you’re going to need a lot of dice to do it.

You’re going to play Fifty, a dice game to be explained in a few moments. More importantly, Cokesbury wants to point out that “this party may be used as a money-making party by selling the sides of the tables at from twenty-five cents to one dollar each, depending upon the financial ability of those who are to attend.”

So let’s tote that up. If, as Cokesbury recommends, you have six to ten tables, four sides per table, that means if you go cheap and charge four bits a side for ten tables, you’re going to gross TEN WHOLE DOLLARS. If you go totally bursar and charge a dollar a side, well, buddy, your gross will be forty big ones, enough in 1932 to buy several hundred ivory-handled backscratchers.

Now that you’re totally pumped with the Vegas casino-like profits of the evening, here’s the game:

The game is scored as follows: Anything double except three and six counts five. Double three cancels all your score for that game as well as that of your partner. Partners must begin again from zero, and mark only the score then made until the whistle blows. Fifty is a game, and the object is to see who gets to fifty first. The leader blows a whistle and all start throwing. Each player gets only one throw and the cubes then pass to the left. They all play until some couple gets a score of fifty, at which time they yell “Fifty.” The game then stops, and all players add up their score for that game. If the game is too fast like this, and it is desirable to slow it up, have the whole group controlled by the head table. All must play until the head table scores fifty. This will eliminate some of the necessity for haste.

Now I’ve read this party several times. I’ve used candles and lemon juice to try to find invisible writing in the margins. But nowhere can I find what happens if, for example, one rolls a double six, or any dice combination that isn’t a double of anything. Are those rolls scored? What do double-sixes equal? I’m so confused.

Cokesbury advises that it’ll take twelve to fifteen rounds to fill the evening. After the game is over, remove your dice-like objects from the table and serve . . . cake and punch or cake and ice cream. No sandwiches. Unless you’ve got loads left over from past parties.

There you go. Now, on to next week and the Alphabet Party. Cokesbury naturally chooses the Roman alphabet, but it’s possible to modify this to Greek or Cyrillic or whatever. Unless, of course, you’ve got guests who are afraid of any letter outside the traditional twenty-six. In that case, get some more gum wood . . .