My Dearest Sinophobes:
Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn’t hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.
Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李
The pipes tend to be insulated, the temperatures don’t really get very low (coldest I’ve ever seen is -10° and that was for a couple of hours), and that’s at night, and the cold “season” is very short. It takes time to freeze pipes, and here it just doesn’t get cold enough to do that.
We used, as I said above, a PU (PVC? I don’t know, I’m not a polymer expert) sheet the same size as the table to protect the glass under it. 1.5mm is all you need, it rolls up nicely to set aside, and you can put maps and stuff under it to keep it visible but protected.
And the metal dice won’t shatter your tabletop like one evil d10 did mine. 😬
Central China. Wuhan to be specific. If you’re going to visit, go to the south. It’s pleasantly warm in winter. Or bundle up and go north. They heat their homes in the north. It’s the poor suckers near the Yangtze that get screwed.
Usually only the one, but if I’m going to run a game I’ll bring several sets because there’s always someone (possibly more than one) who doesn’t have one.
And yes, there’s no insulation anywhere here. The walls are mostly concrete (with plaster, etc. over top, natch) and when cold weather hits actively start to radiate cold. (I know, I know, technically they’re sucking heat out, but it FEELS radiative!). All the windows are single-glaze and they’re not particularly well-sealed either, so drafts are common.
Central heating (and insulation) is not common here. And cold weather rarely lasts longer than two weeks. We make do with small space heaters at need and I’ve got the space heater I’m using under my desk right now, keeping my legs nice and toasty. But the thick wooden desk is insulating quite well from the heat source, sadly.
3D printing in metals of various kinds is pretty common these days.
As the proud (and almost exclusive) user of metal dice¹, however, let me warn you that metal dice have a few problems.
As others have noted, you can really scar the wood of tables. What they didn’t note is that they can also, if they land just wrong, break glass. I have a nice coffee table that had a glass overlay about 5mm thick or so. (Note the past tense.) One of my d10s landed JUST WRONG, apparently on a hidden flaw that left a stress point, and that lovely glass overlay broke into three large shards. Replacing that was too expensive for my tastes. The solution was to buy a transparent PU (I think?) cover to the same dimensions—only 1.5mm thick was more than enough—and always unroll that over the replacement glass. But you have to be aware of just how damaging metal dice can be. (Other alternatives include using dice towers, rolling bowls, etc., but the PU cover has an added bonus of letting you put key documents, maps, etc. under it for quick reference without worrying about getting pizza grease on it.
They’re heavy. Indeed that’s part of their appeal, but if you carry multiple sets it can get a bit unpleasant. Sometimes my purse feels like I’m carrying several sets of knuckle dusters or something.
This is one I haven’t heard comments on, but they get very cold in chill environments. Were I playing today (3°C at my desk at the moment) I’d use plastic dice.
¹ E.g.: https://i.imgur.com/X11DeQ2.jpg
I’ve only played one deck building game (Star Realms) and there were times when it felt like two people playing solitaire, only to suddenly burst into hard exchanges. It was kind of interesting.
In card games I always like that little spice that’s added when discards can be picked up by someone else and used. It adds an element of “should I perhaps continue with this less-than-perfect hand, or should I risk helping someone else build the perfect hand?”
A lot of the games I play only once or twice are “cute” and “fun” the first one or two times, then get very … predictable. And naturally some are just games I don’t like at all. I play them once, then never pull them off the shelf again.
Some games I really like, even after multiple plays, but they’re too much a chore to set up. Or they’re too hard to get the right number of players together for. Or they take more time than I usually have. Or they take more space than I can spare.
Then there’s the “new shiny” problem. I could play some games over and over and over again, but the people I’d play with have seen this new game and they want to try it. And so many board games are being published weekly (it seems) that there’s ALWAYS a new shiny that keeps people running toward them.
I don’t know these games (I’m out of the loop on commercial and board games for the past 20-odd years, sadly) but I have loved this mechanism since playing the earliest rummy-family games from China. (Majiang is the most recent of a loooooooooooooooooong line of build-and-discard games in China.) The added spice of worrying if someone is going to use your discard to improve their hand or even complete it before you can do yours is part of why I like playing the rummy family.