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bonefall · 8 months

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Thinking about that one post about the 5000 year old teenager girl found buried with her collection of 180 sheep ankle bones but specifically the addition of how ankle bones were used as dice back then and she was a gamer.. what I'm getting at is: would clan cats make bone dice and Are They Gaming

First let me teach you a little bit about Knucklebones: The Game.

You probably know one of its variants better as Jacks, that game you play with a rubber ball and little metal spikes. There's a version of Knucklebones in nearly every culture, where the basic idea is to throw an object up in the air, pick up as many of the smaller objects as possible, and then catch the larger object before it hits the ground.

In cultures with a lot of access to livestock, usually the hand and ankle bones of sheep would be used. Places that don't have them might use rocks, seeds, shells, whatever. It was Ancient Greece that had such an extreme take on the game that it eventually evolved into dice-throwing-- a totally chance-based game where you would just throw the biggest foot bone of a sheep (the astralagus; equivalent to the talus in a human) and see how they landed.

So the girl they uncovered in Kazakhstan with the 180 sheep bones wasn't really buried "with dice," make sense? It's more like being buried with jacks. Central Asia is actually jam-packed with knucklebones-types games. Mongolian Shagai is recognized by UNESCO.

And it makes a TON of sense, because those regions are grasslands absolutely ideal for raising sheep.

SO. CLAN CATS.

There's two major considerations here;

ONE: The access to, and size of, sheep bones.

Clan cats don't kill sheep. TRIBE cats actually have access to sheep and kill one or two a year! I would actually like to give them a bunch of special uses for various parts of the sheep. I think the eagle-killing thing in canon is actually pretty ridiculous for several reasons

BUT THAT SAID, an astralagus is the size of a cat's paw.

[ID: A human holding an astralagus in the tips of its fingers.]

You'd need to play a different sort of game with this. It's more like a square softball to a cat than a little rubber ball.

Boar also have bones like this, though. A muntjac probably produces bones that are sized properly for a cat. Hares and rabbits are probably the BEST bet here though, which, somehow feels right. I'm not sure why, but WindClan seems like the gamerclan Clan that would think up these sorts of cute games.

Something about it fits their whole savvy culture, tunneling, emphasis on trade and invention pre-Heatherstar. ShadowClan and WindClan share a cultural value of innovation, but ShadowClan seems more... chemical and competitive.

Hard to explain it. ShadowClan invents flax retting and WindClan invents the drop spindle. There's overlap but it has a bit of a different flavor between them.

TWO: Range of motion

I've made BB!Cats have the same range of motion as the cats in canon, which is higher than a real cat. They're able to WEAVE, you can't do that without a basic pincher grasp. They're also able to mix herbs, wrap things up in leaves, and apply bandages.

I haven't actually given my reworked cats much more ability than they already had, I just codified rules based on what we already see.

But that said, they DO have less range of motion in their hands than humans. They have little thumbs and a better ability to grab, but can't twist their paws completely upwards. There's no way they can toss an object straight up, then catch it again.

So any games they do play would need to accommodate that. So far I've got Scratchstone, Teeterstrike, and an unnamed rhyme game. The bone game would need to look more like a game of marbles than jacks. Or, maybe more modified to accommodate swipes and strikes, somehow? Or a two-person game of catch?

Gotta think about it.

#Partner and I had a super cool food idea for the tribe where they make a sort of like... flavored bone lolly out of sheep bones #Called a Sucker #And they'd soak it in juice before leaving on a hunt and gauge how long they had been out based on the fading flavor of their sucker #And have a cool phrase like ''where have you been?? My sucker's gone bland you spanner''#And if they go into something dangerous like a cave or down a river #they actually leave their sucker behind #so if they run into danger and someone comes looking for them #they'd see their sucker unattended #The sucker would also get holes carved in it to feed a brightly colored string or something through it #So it's very bright and conspicuous #And you can tell what sucker belongs to whom based on how they bedazzled it #But I couldn't find anything on flavoring bones or replenishing their flavor #Since humans aren't dedicated carnivores #The string has the added value of making it easy to pull out if they accidentally swallow the bone #But it's all still wip #clan culture #bone babble

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