My folks picked up a sweet board game in Cape Cod. It’s called SHUT THE BOX! It’s essentially a box with 9 tiles inside numbered 1 through 9. The tiles are attached to a dowel and can be flipped up or down.
The player rolls two die and then has to flip down a number of tiles whose sumation is equal to the sumation of the dice roll.
Example: if I roll two sixes, I could flip the 9 and 3, or a 6, 3,2,1 or a 7,5… etc
You keep rolling until you either can not flip down the total sum of the dice, or you run out of tiles. When you don’t flip down all the tiles, your score is read across the tiles left to right. So if your end tiles were 1 – 3 4 5 6 – – 9, your score would be 134,569. If you completely run out of tiles you shout SHUT THE BOX! then you Shut the box! and the game is over. Apparently this originates from a betting game where people would throw money in the box. The person who successfully “SHUT THE BOX!” would then close the box, win all the money, and take it home.
So Ryan Schenk played this game, and like any human being fell in love with it immediately. But unlike the rest of us mortals, he then decided to program the game. So here it is, Ryan’s first draft of SHUT THE BOX!
Fun fact: the algorithm that determines if you can continue playing, based on your current dice roll, runs in O( n! ) time! Yikes!
We had one of these when I was a kid! I had completely forgotten about it, my Dad made it for us. Way to bring back the memories Mike!
The kids have a game sort of like that. No box, though. I like the program. I shut the box on my second attempt.
The best I got was 3. Good thing this internet version doesn’t cost money. Right? Right?
Yeah, good thing. Cause I’m a cheapskate.
I want to yell “shut the box!” in other situations. Like, avoiding unpleasant converstion. Just carry around an open box with you at all times. And when you’re talking to someone, and the talk gets frustrating, just yell, “Shut the box!” and slam the box shut and run away.