A lot of my gaming buddies date back to the early 1980’s. Some have moved away, one unfortunately passed away entirely before his time. Two months ago my friend Ben had a stroke. He’s doing better, but he’s in a recovery facility. Today my wife and I took two games and played them with Ben, and we came up short in supplies! We’re on the road, and there’s limits to what I can bring, especially when we don’t know what we’ll be playing. Generally on road trips I pack small games and only bring RPG stuff when I know for a fact we’ll be playing an RPG.
So I got caught short.
We played “Hey! That’s my fish!”, a nice little simple game with tile laying and resource collecting, with an interesting self-destructing board: the space you start on is the space that you collect on your next turn, and it’s removed from the board. We had fun with that, and then went to play Munchkin, and quickly realized two problems: no dice and no counters.
Munchkin needs 1d6 to run away from monsters, and every player needs 10 chits of some sort to count levels earned. I didn’t have either. Conveniently I had an excellent iPhone app called The Dicenomicon, I highly recommend it, and dialed up a 1d6 roller. Dice problem solved. And since we only needed chits and what was on said chits was irrelevant, so we pulled out the sixty or so tokens from That’s My Fish.
Worked great. Well, aside from screwing up the rules in Munchkin in a couple of places. There’s tons of dice rolling programs for smart phones and tablets, lots are free, Dicenomicon is not but it’s a really good program. And chances are you can find something to substitute for counters.
Look around you, there are solutions just begging to be implemented.
High Altitude Game Design 