Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter by Josh Gates

Author:Josh Gates [Gates, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780743491723
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2011-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

12: Threes and the Christmas Miracle of Whore-Dice

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Friendly competitions of strategy and chance have been around since man first learned how to whittle crude game pieces. Variants of checkers are more than one thousand years old. Mancala, even older than that. In present-day Iran, archaeologists unearthed a five-thousand-year-old backgammon game and the oldest dice ever discovered.

A history of games is a history of fraternity. Games are the inspiration for many of our most important bonding moments and a lightning rod for our most arbitrary fights (I’m sure caveman game night never ended well). In my childhood, we played factory-made favorites like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Trivial Pursuit. Today, video games are quickly supplanting the classics, but no matter the platform, be it a wooden board or a Play Station 3, games are still a prominent feature of our upbringing. A familiar touchstone that brings us together. They’re home.

Which is why, thousands of miles away, we play them on Destination Truth. Also, we like to gamble. A lot. Since nearly the beginning of the show, the crew and I have been playing something called Threes. It is, in my humble opinion, a nearly perfect travel game, and in just about any scene on D.T., there’s usually a small pouch of dice tucked in my back pocket. I reproduce the rules here for anyone bound for ports unknown. If you aren’t interested in such things or are morally opposed to betting on games of chance, feel free to skip to the next chapter. Actually, feel free to skip to wherever you like. You really don’t need me telling you how to read a book.

I’ve read that the game is also called Tripps, but the origin is completely unknown to me. It came to Destination Truth courtesy of our second-season audio guy, Ponch, who had picked it up from the crew on Survivor. Where they learned it, I have no idea.

Threes requires five dice and a flat surface. That’s it. Hell, even the flat surface is negotiable. We once played on the lurching deck of a fishing boat.

The rules are simple. Every side of each dice is worth its face value, except for the three side, which is worth zero. The point of the game is to get the lowest score. The player rolls all five dice. Then, leaving at least one die (if there are any threes showing, the player would obviously want to leave those), the player collects the remainder and recasts. Once the player is out of rolls (if he leaves only one dice down after each throw, he could throw a maximum of five times), he adds the values of the dice to calculate his final score. A perfect round would end with five threes (and zero points).

Play then passes to the left until everyone has a turn. The player with the lowest score wins the pot. The winner rolls last in the next round (the person sitting to his left goes first).

A few important side rules:

1. One round of Threes costs the equivalent of one dollar in any currency.

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