Button Men
Posted by Rob Herman at May 11th, 2006
Several years ago I came across a great dice game called Button Men. The gimmick was neat: you’d walk around a convention wearing your button, which simultaneously advertised that you would play and served as your “character” in the game. As appropriate for a game from Cheapass Games, the buttons were inexpensive and required no other equipment except for ordinary polyhedral dice.
I think the game is great. It’s very fast to play—a best-of-three match is probably 3 or 4 minutes long. Luck is involved, but understanding probability and controlling risks is a much bigger factor. Probability junkies like me will love the intense, sometimes counter-intuitive calculations that go into the deceptively deep play.
Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on, or didn’t stick around as a fad. I didn’t see any buttons at Origins last year, and I’ve never seen one at Marcon. I suspect that after the novelty wore off, the high math factor made most players shelve the idea. Which is a shame, because for me, it’s still a fascinating game.
Luckily, you don’t have to actually buy any buttons to play the game. The stats for various characters are all published on sites like this one. I recommend printing out the list of characters from one of the easy sets, grabbing a handful of dice and a friend, and getting started. To make matters even better, there’s a site that lets you play online with other fans.
Final note: the flavor of the game was a welcome swipe from the roleplay-snob zeitgeist of the 1990s as well. The little foldout rulebook that came with the buttons contained little biographies of the characters, like: Iago is a sorcerer with mystic powers and is available for bar mitzvahs. He also likes to beat people up.
I played the online game for about 2 years. Doing the simple arithmatic 4 times a day or so for 15 minutes really, really helped me out on the GRE’s, where I got a perfect score in the math section. Without that, I know I’d have done worse.
If we get the hardware for this, I’ll play anyone IRL any time.
Actually, I should aslo mention that I had all the hardware to play this for a long time, but instead convinced a friend to play 3 games at once online, using our laptops, sitting in the same room.
Trashtalk is great when you can’t see what the other person is doing until you get through 2 more turns.
I do have a laptop…
Are you opposed to using regular dice?