Yardzee

I do enjoy making things.  This summer I decided to make some large yard dice so we could play yardzee outside on Canada Day.  There are a tons of Youtube™ videos on different versions of yardzee and how to do it, but I thought I could do this simple, do-able project.  I only have a small electric hand sander, but it was up to the job.

I selected a long piece of wood at Home Depot that was 4x4x10.  (Turns out the 4″ is actually 3.5″ – why? just because I’m told.)  Anyway, I chopped the wood into 3.5 inch squares with help from the Home Depot guys (excellent service!).

When I got the rough yardzee blocks home, I sat outside and started sanding the raw surface and on the edges to get them nice and rounded.  Wow, this was long and tedious!  It took me hours to do just one and I went through about 15 sheets of sanding paper.  The wood actually looked really nice, even without paint and I could have stopped there.  Maybe another time, I’ll just varnish them.

Eventually, I started to paint using an exterior white.  The first coat went on the top part of the cube only since I needed to set in down to dry.  So I did them in stages with each coat on the other side.  I did four full coats on each cube over a few days.

The dots are just little rubber feet I found.  I had a normal size dice in front of me and copied it exactly.  I knew that the opposite sides had to add up to 7, but there are still variations within that one rule.

Finishing Touches

I got a nice rubber bucket from Dollarama for throwing the yardzee blocks. After a few test throws, I found that a die will often land on an edge requiring players to agree on additional ground rules (see what I did there).  I am so bloody funny!