tabletop time machine
Zohn Ahl
Zohn Ahl is typical of many stick-dice race games played by first-nation Americans. Stick dice are sticks split down the middle to produce a flat and a rounded side, the flat side often decorated and coloured.
Three or more may be cast on the ground and the binary number so produced dictates how fast a player’s token advances along the trick from start to home. N sticks can yield n+1 different results.
This race game of the plains Indians was first described by American ethnologist Stewart Culin in Games of the North American Indians (1907). Culin quotes a first-hand but somewhat garbled description by one Col. HL Scott of a game he calls Zohn Ahl (zohn = creek ; ahl = wood), or the Ahl game. It was played by women and children, never men.