One year ago we started construction on an addition to our house. That extension of our living room came to be known as “The Library,” for that was where my shelves and shelves of books (I am an English professor) ended up along with a couch for reading. The process of moving all the books from my office to the new library, culling the ones that I no longer was interested in and organizing the ones I was keeping, was an involved and enjoyable process. My wife hates the process of moving and organizing, but I take great pleasure in reviewing my collection of books and thinking about the best way to arrange them on the shelves. More recently I went through the same process with my boardgame collection, eliminating games that were no longer going to get played and organizing the rest in some sort of aesthetically pleasing and logically consistent way. Yet, I’ve never thought of the walk-in closet where we keep most of the games as a library. One obvious reason for this is you wouldn’t actually sit down to play a game inside the closet, but even if it was my boardgames instead of my books that had migrated to the new addition, I’m not sure we would have thought to call it the library. Yet, there are many similarities between my collection of books and my collection of boardgames. read more…
Growing up as a kid in the 80s I was like a lot of kids at the time, I loved board games. It didn’t matter to me if it was something simple and silly like Life, Monopoly, or Sorry or along the lines of more strategy oriented games like chess, Risk, or Scrabble. The biggest problem for me was not having a lot of people to play these games with. The older you get the tougher it is to find people who find it enjoyable to sit down and play Boggle or Yahtzee no matter how much alcohol is involved.
Recently though I’ve noticed a resurgence in word games thanks to the onslaught of technology. In general technology means the death of these types of board games but with the iPhone and its app for everything I’ve noticed everyone and their sister playing Words with Friends. This is basically Scrabble with the board rearranged a bit as to not infringe upon copyright laws I imagine. read more…
My new office decorations
This is the first blog entry by avid boardgame player, Paul Hackman
I’m a gamer. Typing that word, “gamer,” and I can already feel myself shrinking away from the label. “No, no, not that type of gamer. Not one of those people. The kind of gamer who gathers surreptitiously at seedy boardgame shoppes to meet up for some all-night dice rolling. I’m a family man after all.”
Yet, despite the many negative connotations associated with the idea of a grown man who spends hours and hours shuffling cards, rolling dice, memorizing rules, and pushing pieces around a board, my game closet has recently been flung open and allowed to spill out into my everyday life. Part of the reason for this is pure necessity – my collection of boardgames has grown to almost 200 and already leaves little to no room for the winter coats that were the original occupants of our front closet – but I like to think that displaying some of my games in my home office is also a symbolic gesture of newfound pride and self-reflection. Sure, many of my games have very nice, wooden pieces. They have designers, some of whom are practically celebrities in Europe. I play these games with professors and designers and internet security experts. It all has a veneer of sophistication and legitimacy. And although I very much enjoy nice-looking games and intelligent conversation with my gaming companions, deep down inside I’m still attracted to these games for the same reasons I was as a teenager: they make me feel big in a world that more often than not insists that I am a small part of a vast and opaque universe.
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My First Dal Negro Board
I give backgammon lessons six days a week now to people across the globe. This happy accident sometimes shows me things I wouldn’t otherwise see. For example this past week after one of my lessons I was sent a video link of one of my student’s matches in a live tournament. I mainly watched it to see how he played but I couldn’t help being rubbed the wrong way about the accessories, or lack there of.
The biggest concern I had were the dice cups. Before I come off as someone who is actively over concerned about cheating let me say I am not in the least. I just want to make sure I have a fair shake, as it were. I prefer the dice to be completely random and I don’t want to worry about any external factors so that’s one reason why I carry a nice set of lipped dice cups with me to every tournament, even ones where I don’t tote along a backgammon board. I’ve become so spoiled by the shake and certainty of getting a random result that I even play games such as Yahtzee and many war strategy games with quality dice cups. I haven’t went as far as playing something like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit with dice cups yet but I do love those games. read more…
A spattering of precision dice
Most of this post was originally penned by our great friend Robert, a backgammon player and collector in the Pacific Northwest. We thought that it would be useful to our readers to share some of Robert’s extensive knowledge. What follows are pieces of an exchange we had with Robert back in November of 2009. We hope you enjoy it.
Here we will address precision dice, dice cups and rigged dice, because in a fundamental sense they pertain to the same issue, which could be characterized as minimizing “external risk”, to be distinguished from “internal risk”. First, a word about “internal risk”. Backgammon, at its core, is the challenge of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and in the face of the inevitability of risking having a checker or group of checkers hit at some point during the game.
It’s barely conceivable that if a player threw nothing but the appropriate doubles on each and every throw of an individual game, then as to that specific game the player might possibly be able to run his 15 checkers around the board without ever leaving any individual checker exposed. The possibility could, in practical terms, ever exist, but even so it is so remote as to never be a factor over a series of games. A player must determine when and to what extent he will accept the risk of being hit (and thus sent back to the bar) in exchange for the potential to advance the balance of his checkers, confine his opponent’s checkers, and possibly hit one or more of the opponent’s checkers.
These are the risks that are inherent in the game, and hence (in our parlance) the “internal risks” of backgammon. Expertise in backgammon consists in managing those elements of internal risk. The players who pride themselves on their backgammon skills revel in those elements of internal risk, and insist of doing everything in their power to assure that the dice produce utterly random rolls.
More after the jump!
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Men's Journal, November 2009
We can finally say goodbye to 2009 with a long overdue update to our press section. 8 new magazines were added, including the well known “Men’s Journal”, where our backgammon set was the opener for the entire section.
The press archive only covers magazine and newspapers, but we’ve been fortunate enough to have attention from some great blogs too. Thanks everyone!
Our precision dice come in lots of colors. A free upgrade with every purchase!
It doesn’t matter if you’re playing in a casino or casually. We feel that precision dice are a must for every backgammon game. Unfortunately, most manufacturers only include rinky-dink standard dice with their games and customers are reluctant to spend up to $50 for a pair of precision dice.
We’ve decided that, as gaming fanatics, we simply can’t let this trend continue. As of today, all backgammon sets will be upgraded from standard dice to precision dice for free. We’re also now offering precision dice in our store, and we’re selling them for a fraction of our competitors’ prices.
The bottom line is that the key to our success has proved to be our dedication to making customers happy, and offering you more than any typical store might. So check out some of our precision dice and pick up a pair if you’ve been using a pair of standard dice. Otherwise, if you end up purchasing a game from Zontik Games, we’ve got you covered – precision dice be sent to you set free of charge, regardless of whether they’re included by the manufacturer.
Dal Negro Backgammon in Blue
Happy New Year to all of our blog readers and customers. As a reward for all the hard work in 2009, we welcomed the new year in the sand. To review, 2009 was far and away the biggest year for Zontik Games. We hope that our customers find as much success as we hope to achieve in the coming year.
As you can see from the photo above, we’ve just returned from playing a few games of backgammon on the beach. You’ll notice that we’re using our popular Dal Negro Backgammon Set in Blue. Surprisingly, it makes for a great travel set despite not being originally designed as one!
Geoffrey Parker Prestige Backgammon Set
The Geoffrey Parker backgammon sets are perhaps the finest in the entire industry. Among all products in our backgammon sets & boards category, Geoffrey Parker backgammon sets are king.
Standing in front of one of the backgammon sets, you’ll notice a few things immediately. The quality of materials and the perfection of the hand inlaid points elevates the board from a collection of luxury materials to a real work of art. It’s larger than it appears in photos, and it’s heavier than one might expect. Everything about Geoffrey Parker sets seem larger than life, as though they’ve been hand made for royalty or an aristocrat.
Pictured above is a Geoffrey Parker Prestige set customized by one of our favorite clients, Robert. You may recognize the color scheme from the Prestige’s product page. We ended up using Robert’s set as the example in our shop because, in truth, of all the customized sets we’ve sold, this particular one has been our absolute favorite.
We hope you’ll have the pleasure of owning or playing on one of their sets.
European Poker Chips
As you may have seen from our tweets last night, Zontik Games had a poker night. We learned two important things: #1 If you’re going head to head with the boss, fold and #2 European poker chips are as great to play with as they are to look at.
We used a set of european poker chips from Dal Negro, who (as we’ve said before) are top notch. They actually supply european casinos with their poker chips and cards, and you can feel it in the high quality of the chips.
Zontik Games stock european chip sets in beautiful cases, as well as elegant “poker bags“. Dal Negro does, of course, make other types of chips, like these very beautiful acrylic poker chips. Check out the entire line of dal negro poker products in our gambling games section!