Pins

		Above All Pin Games
			As you now know, all of our pins have a unique characteristic in that they each have a symbol and a digit on them. But what is the point of that? Well, for one, it distinguishes Above All Pins from any other pins. There is another reason, though, and that is... to play games! Each Symbol and Digit can differentiate the pins from each other in a way that you can make a game out of. Take a deck of cards, for example. There are four suits, and 13 different characters, Ace, digits 2-10, and the Royals (Jack, Queen, and King). Look at how many games have been made with just that simple concept! Now take our pins. You can think of each Symbol as a "suit", and each digit as a "character". What kind of games can you make with this? Let's find out! Card Games As mentioned, there are many card games out there, and some of them can be played without the cards using our pins. War: A game of highest card wins, the same concept can be found with our digits 0-9. You could even "play for keeps" to make the game more interesting. You could gain some spoils of war and earn yourself some extra pins! But watch out, you could also lose some! 21: The object of 21 is to get as close as you can to the number 21 without going over. Though the idea remains the same with our pins, the facts that zeroes are included and there is nothing over nine should make the game a bit more interesting... Poker: A simple game of poker can be played if you have enough pins. Bear in mind, though, there are now five suits instead of four, and there are only ten digits instead of thirteen. The statistics aren't the same as you standard game of cards! Board Games Ok, so maybe you also need a board to play these kinds of games... but such a thing could easily be drawn on a sheet of paper! The important thing is you have the pieces, and isn't that what really counts in these games? Many board games have two players, two sides. One is light, one is dark. Do you want to know a secret? Above All Pins have that too! Notice that the Star and Moon symbols are white, and the Spiral and Hourglass are black. True, the Plant is neither. You can think of Plant as a neutral color. So you can just leave it out of the game, or think of some creative way to incorporate it! Checkers: Of course, you will need a board, but with the right amount of pins, just set up on opposing sides, one player uses Star and Moon pins, and the other uses Spiral and Hourglass pins. You can even King each other by pinning two pins together! Chess: Much like checkers, all you need is two have a board, and the right pins. One plays white, the other black. You can decide before-hand which pin is which piece. For example, you can use a 0 pin as a King, a 1 pin as a Queen, 2's can be Bishop, 3's can be Knights, 4's can be Rooks. All digits 5 and higher can be pawns. Backgammon, Reversi, Go, etc.: Many games such as these use just regular ol' black and white "stones". All you have to do is replace them with pins and you got a game! Granted, though, some may require more pins than others. A real game of Go for example would require a crazy amount of pins. But you can always play a condensed version on a smaller board. Above All Pins Games There are many games you can play using the unique features of our pins, so you can even make up your own! Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started: Ten Pin Win: Similar to dominoes, you try to get the value of the table to equal multiples of ten. Every time you do, you get that many points. First, someone places a pin on the table. If it is a Light color (Star or Moon), you add that value. If it is a Dark color (Spiral or Hourglass), you subtract that value. If it is a Neutral color (Plant), you can choose to do either. The table value can go into the negatives, but don't worry, even a negative number will give you the positive amount of points. Take turns to try to get multiples of ten, then when someone runs out of pins, the game is over and the player with the most points wins! Pin-cycle: This game is similar to the ancient game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Each Symbol on the pin represents an element of nature (Spiral = Air, Moon = Water, Plant = Life, Hourglass = Earth, Star = Fire) and can "defeat" one other symbol, but in turn, it can also be "defeated by" another. Water beats fire, Fire beats air, Air beats earth, and Earth beats water. Life can possibly beat anything, and can possibly be beaten by anything. This is determined by the digit. In this case, highest digit wins. When you win a round, you keep yours and your opponent's pin for that round (you can play "for keeps" if you decided to do that before the game began). This can continue for however long you like. If there is a stalemate (for instance, Water vs. Air), then those two pins are set aside and players continue to the next round. Once a player defeats the other, they keep all pins set aside in the stalemate. And those were just off the top of my head! Use your imaginations! There's plenty of games out there like these that we at Above All Comics don't even know about, so we couldn't tell you about them! Speaking of that, if you have an idea for games that you could play using our pins, please feel free to email our Suggestion Box and let us know! We'd love to post them on the site to share them with others. So now that you got plenty of ideas, let the games begin!