Meyer

So, I might've been in my early teens or so, when my (I guess) babysitter (or, just slightly more responsible late teen friend of the family) and I were hanging out at the summer house, out in the woods, and he, out of nowhere, says he has a game we can play.

It needs just two dice and a cup.

Ok, that's manageable. What are the rules?

Well... You ante up, uh... one of your matches, and roll the dice. Then you pass the cup to the next player who has to match or trump that. Oh, number are read as tens and units, so a 4 and a 6 is read as 64. I mean, you could say 46 if you want, but why would you ever want to? Uh... and doubles are all higher than that, from 11 actually being double-1, to double-6.

Why do you need the cup?

The cup is there so you can bluff. If you believe the other other player, you can try to roll a higher roll, or, if you don't, you can call. (Older me has read a bit of statistics and game theory and thinks "believe" is a bit of an iceberg here.)

Oh yeah, and then there's "Little Meyer", which is 2-3, which beats the doubles, and then, of course, "Big Meyer", 1-2, which has a special rule attached: It costs double to claim it, and it costs double to call it. (Getting someone else to call it is a completely legit tactic.)

Presented in this way, can you blame me for thinking he just made it up completely on the spot?

I've believed that until just now, actually, when I found more or less exactly this variant, Meyer, of Liar's Dice.

Anyway, it was fun to play, and a nice distraction from how he'd try to trick me a lot of the time, the differences between us, primarily age, making for some, in retrospect, rather nasty, not to say cruel, dynamics.