Laminate Rating Tables for Your Favorite Games so You Can Reuse Them
A few years ago, a group of friends of mine discovered the Quixx dice game. If you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend it. Basically, you roll a set of colored dice and then try to mark the numbers on the score sheet based on the total.
This is definitely an oversimplification of the rules; however, the big takeaway for the purposes of this post is that you need to use a new protocol for each person every time you play. This means if you play a game with a group of friends at the bar once or twice a week, you will get a feel for the included rating pad pretty quickly.
After a trip to a board game bar on vacation, my friend Randall had the fantastic idea to cut down on all the waste and ensure that we always have cards to play with: laminate them.
It’s a super-simple solution, but we just haven’t considered it until then.
She bought these self-sealing bags from Amazon . A pack of five pouches costs about $ 4, which is unlikely to bankrupt a bank, but you may need more than one for games you play with more than five people at a time, or larger ones if you have larger rating cards.
You will also need to purchase several cleaning markers.
However, for games that you often play with disposable paper cards, this can be a pretty solid investment. We ordered replacement scorecards. They are hard to find in stores, so every time we got our scorecards (which ended up in trash) in the mail, they were packed into even more trash. Not good.
Depending on the size of your protocol, you may not need pouches at all. We’ve written before about using packing tape to laminate items , which can potentially work for small scoresheets. It’s even better if you have access to a laminator at work or your local store.
In the long term, lamination will reduce the amount of trash you create, which is an environmental benefit, and with laminated cards, you have scorecards close at hand without having to worry about reordering when you start to dry out or what else. worse, opening the box just to realize you’ve forgotten about it and you don’t have enough cards to play.