Facinating post! I may protest some of the Trouble games I lost to my sister in the early 1970's due to the Pop-O-Matic inconsistincies you uncovered:) I guess they can update it with some chips and a display upgrade, but the experience wouldn't be as good as the original.
Back in 2018, I bought some empty plastic capsules, the kind you'd see in a little toy vending machine. They were big enough to fit two or three small dice. My idea was to build dice pools and seal them in the plastic capsules.
On your turn, shake a capsule; place it on the board; the types of dice and their results matter.
What stumped me at the time was how this would be better than unsealed dice pools. Adjacencies to different capsules could matter. Being in a sealed container also meant that they could be moved around (carefully) without changing their results. It never quite gelled unfortunately.
But here's the real question - how random are dice rolls when players who shake the die really just shake it back and forth? This is a great start on research, but I'd like to know how the Pop-O-Matic compares to dice towers and various human "shake and rolls".
Facinating post! I may protest some of the Trouble games I lost to my sister in the early 1970's due to the Pop-O-Matic inconsistincies you uncovered:) I guess they can update it with some chips and a display upgrade, but the experience wouldn't be as good as the original.
Back in 2018, I bought some empty plastic capsules, the kind you'd see in a little toy vending machine. They were big enough to fit two or three small dice. My idea was to build dice pools and seal them in the plastic capsules.
On your turn, shake a capsule; place it on the board; the types of dice and their results matter.
What stumped me at the time was how this would be better than unsealed dice pools. Adjacencies to different capsules could matter. Being in a sealed container also meant that they could be moved around (carefully) without changing their results. It never quite gelled unfortunately.
But here's the real question - how random are dice rolls when players who shake the die really just shake it back and forth? This is a great start on research, but I'd like to know how the Pop-O-Matic compares to dice towers and various human "shake and rolls".