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Household or Uncommon Items

3 replies [Last post]
Fri, 05/14/2004 - 11:12
SVan
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Joined: 10/02/2008

When I go shopping, I'm always on the look-out for new game components, especially for ideas I haven't even thought of yet. At our local Dollar Tree they have 3 Tic-Tac containers for a dollar (with Tic-Tacs, too!) After we ate 2 of them, my wife made the comment that I could use them for a game. She's probably finds as much things as me. I then went looking around for more components (and bought another thing of Tic-Tacs, to give me 6 containers in total) and worked on an idea for a game. As I was trying to flesh the idea out more, I found double 6 dominoes, that just happened to have 6 colors. Last night I found 200 wooden popsicle-like sticks that were 6 colors as well, for just a dollar.

Does anyone pick up stuff just to use for a possible game they haven't thought of yet? What uncommon or household items have you used in your prototypes?

-Steve

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Fri, 05/14/2004 - 12:23
#1
DavemanUK
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Joined: 12/31/1969
sticky labels

Hi SVan,

Yup, every time I pop into our local stationers during lunch, I browse the sticky labels section for the colours/shapes/lettering for ideas (about $1.50 for a bag of 200-300 labels). I've bought a wadge of thick paper (10cm x 5cm sheets) to literally randomly stick the labels to in order to come up with designs for cards/tiles/resources for a game that I've not yet designed :)

Basically, the above uses the technique of 'design through random thought' (rather than just staring at a blank piece of paper for hours and getting nowhere). Try it yourself and see :)

I was also sent a dozen 'vouchers' for £25 savings on items of furniture (if I spent over £500 so they're pretty duff anyway), but I have kept them for use as big notes in a future currency game.

Best wishes,
Dave W.

(a 'wadge' is about 100 sheets) :)

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Fri, 05/14/2004 - 13:51
#2
Verseboy
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Household or Uncommon Items

I used pennies for scoring chips in one of my games. They're easy to handle and they cost about a penny a piece!

Steve

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Fri, 05/14/2004 - 13:59
#3
SVan
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Joined: 10/02/2008
Household or Uncommon Items

Verseboy wrote:
I used pennies for scoring chips in one of my games. They're easy to handle and they cost about a penny a piece!

I used pennies in my last game as action tokens. I hate pennies, so i figured I should get some use out of the ones my wife wants to collect.

-Steve

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