Dreidel

I was raised Lutheran in a mixed religion house. My mom went back to Judaism around when I went to college, and has since decided to start celebrating Hanukkah and stuff. So I didn't play Dreidel until I was in my late 20s. I'm not the intended audience, but I'm still surprised at the rules as written if we can believe wikipedia.

The component is actually pretty cool. It's essentially a spinning d4 with four Hebrew letters on it. I'm tempted to use it for dagger damage in D&D.

As far as the actual rules go, everyone starts with 10-15 coins or whatever and each put one into the pot. Then you spin. Assuming that the top is fair, each of these has a 25% chance of coming up.

Nun: Nothing happens.
Shin: Put one in the pot. (Wikipedia does say that some versions have you put 3 in)
Hei: Take half the pot (rounded up).
Gimel: Take the whole pot.

Game ends when only one person has money, although it's possible to give other players loans.

So in my mind, there's a problem right away in that 1/4 of the time nothing happens. Nun effectively reads "lose your turn." That has never been particularly fun... but as soon as one person spins Gimel; 3/4 of the faces effectively become Nun until someone spins Shin. So the game quickly grinds to a halt and seems to exist only to waste time at that point. There's nothing inherently wrong with a 100% luck game, especially for children, but this one quickly devolves into very little happening on each turn. I'm surprised that the game has existed this long in the current state.

One fairly simple house rule that I thought of is to put half of yours in on hei, which will lead to more interesting jackpots on gimel and change up the economy to actually add more stuff in the pot instead of having it sit there relatively empty most of the time.

Thoughts? Am I being too hard on this? Anyone here with positive memories actually playing dreidel? Despite the cool piece, the game feels worse than even chutes and ladders.

I grew up in a Catholic family in the Jewish section of Indianapolis (46260 zip code), but only got to play Dreidel once when a first-grade classmate brought one in for show-and-tell. The dreidel itself was neat, but I was already playing Acquire with my parents and so not impressed by the Dreidel gameplay.

For what it's worth, Dreidel is ranked 19,702 at BGG, with a "geek rating" of 5.385 and an average rating of 3.72, based on 105 votes.

You have to ante to play, so Gimel is always a winner.

Keep in mind, the traditional Chanukah gift is money. So the kids all have coins and are looking to make some sweet gambling loot.

Ah, that makes sense. Gambling can add excitement to many games. Notorious sports and political writer Hunter S Thompson observed that the best way to watch professional football is to bet money on every play.

jeb wrote: You have to ante to play, so Gimel is always a winner.

Ahh, classic round/game/turn rules writing/reading mistake!

It kept seeming like stuff I was reading was saying that you ante at the start of a round, and the round ends when someone runs out of money.

This certainly helps the economy of the game and prevents it from turning into 3/4 "do nothing."

So it's more or less LCR?

When we play there are far too many shenanigans with the gelt for it to be a serious game—it's more of a Calvinball experience.