We spent a weekend in coastal Delaware with her parents-my first time on vacation with them. Balut was a solid after-dinner treat.Ī couple of decades later, I was dating the woman whom I would later marry. My dad explained the rules to us-they were similar to poker, which we all already knew how to play-but I only cared about shaking the dice around in that cup, hearing them jangle as they banged into one another before I threw those bad boys down. We sat around a table in the family room and passed around a weighty cup with a thick, embossed leather hide wrapped around its outside. When I was young, my dad taught my brother and sister and me the game of Balut: an antecedent to Yahtzee that, according to a legend that’s more fun when accepted as straight history, was invented by bored American soldiers stationed in the Philippines during World War II. I never meant to become obsessed with Yahtzee, but all of the early signs were there. Hold a pair of dice-or five of them, for that matter-in your hand and you know you’re holding something which cannot be improved upon. You can run your fingertips over the thermoset plastic, which gives dice a sheen similar to tooth enamel, and feel the series of perfectly round depressions that mark each number. There are few perfect things in this world.
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