The owner of Games By Email takes his job seriously. He does all the dice rolling, to keep things fair. That’s a lot of rolling. What to do?

His first effort was a Lego tower attached to a 286 with a camera and catcher. This contraption was able to roll up to 80,000 rolls per day. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, the Lego tower didn’t survive a move, and he wanted something more permanent, anyway. So he came up with a bigger, better one: the Dice-O-Matic.

The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall made from aluminum and Plexiglas. Read all about it, but suffice to say it rolls over 1,300,000 rolls per day. Some might call this overkill, but we call it an elegant bit of hacking.

• 1 Comment

Mattel and Fisher Price will pay a $2.3 million fine for their role in the lead contamination toy scandal in 2007. (source)

In other Mattel news, Mattel is jumping on the movie bandwagon, with plans to adapt one of its toys to the big screen. Could be Rock’em Sock’em Robots? (source)

And the makers of Bratz, the first doll to seriously compete with Mattel’s Barbie, lost control of the doll to Mattel, since the inventor had the idea for the doll while he was still working at Mattel.  MGA Entertainment, current license holder, is filing an appeal. (source) Last we heard, winning Bratz hadn’t helped Mattel much, as Bratz dolls were being dumped at low prices into the market, displacing even more Barbie sales.

• 0 Comments

Want to kick the tires on the new Rogue Trader RPG? Then check out your nearest store participating in Free RPG day (don’t get your hopes too far up – this event remains woefully advertised within the retailer community) – Fantasy Flight Games has announced that they will be releasing “Forsaken Bounty” a full color, 24 page, introductory adventure with quick start rules and pre-generated characters as part of the event. Free RPG Day is June 20th for those lucky enough to have a participating store – the rest of us will be able to download the PDF later from FFG’s website.

• 0 Comments

Muzoracle from JS Kingfisher is a … uh … well, I’m not really sure what it is. It’s got 12-sided dice that correspond to some sort of musical scale, an 89 card deck representing different notes from different instruments, and some way of corresponding all of these into feelings and music.

The result of playing with it might be similar to what Mozart got when he threw dice to create a symphony.

Out of Muzoracle came Musician’s Dice, which more directly fits the above comparison, perhaps.

If these are all too esoteric to you, you might wait for his Muzundrum, a game from JS’s label Philomuse, which is supposed to be released soon.

(source)

• 2 Comments