Bar Mitzvah

Release Date: December 2005
Set Size: 2 Buttons
Publisher: None
Designers: Ted Alper
Artist: "Laura"

The Bar Mitzvah set was created by Ted Alper for use at his son's coming of age celebration. There were two buttons in the set, Bar Mitzvah Boy and Judah Maccabee. While Bar Mitzvah Boy was a straightforward button, using only Option Dice and Focus Dice, Judah required a working knowledge of Hebrew in order to play as the symbols for Speed, Mighty, and Ornery were notated with Hebrew lettering. The stats given in the recipes below are the translations.

When asked about the designing of the buttons via Button Men Online, Ted Alpert said the following:

[The Set] was for my son's bar mitzvah in December 2005 (by coincidence, it was during Chanukkah); He and I both played a lot of button men. We wanted a casual, low-key party and decided to make it focused on board games. We made one button *sort* of him (and the text on the Torah scroll is the opening line of the Torah portion for the date of his bar mitzvah).  We needed a companion button to play against it, and due to the holiday, Judah Maccabee seemed like a natural choice.  (He's famous as a warrior, which was appropriate for a button man.)

I LOVE big focus dice (like Crab's) -- there's such a lovely gambit of sacrificing a big die for initiative -- and 30 is such a big number; also the aesthetic pleasure  of lowering a focus die to avoid a skill attack. that said, there is some meaning to the numbers on Bar Mitzvah Boy-- 13, the age of bar mitzvah, 613 commandments of the torah [as 6/13 Option] -- the other numbers are just for balance (though there's a slight shoutout to 30 as "the age of strength" in a mishnah passage that had come up in discussion with Morris around that time.

The letters on the button actually spell out Maccabee [M - K - B - Y], in keeping with the part of the story that says the word Maccabee was written on their banners and shields, so I tried to associate each letter with a button skill, and though my own hebrew is pretty minimal, my son was near-fluent then (and is totally fluent now) -- so the "K" became koach -- strength, the "M" became mahir -- fast, and the yud -- "y" -- just became a Y swing. I did sort of do it freestyle for the "B" -- I made it bitachon, which is like security or in some religious contexts it's faith in the protection of God. I used that for "ornery" dice, rather than translate the word literally. They always seemed to me to rely on the same sort of emotion -- having to rely on faith in the random number generator. The only number that might be thematic is the "8," a number with significance for Chanukkah, the 8-day holiday, 'miracle of the oil', etc.-- the rest was balance.

Buttons

• 

  Bar Mitzvah Boy
  (6/13) (8) (10) f(13) f(30)
• 

  Judah Maccabee
  (8) z(12) H(4) o(12) (Y)