Haikubes (2010) and the subsequent Love Haikubes (2013) are dice game sets by Forrest-Pruzan Creative, a graphic design and publishing company in Seattle, Washington.

In each of the two sets of Haikubes, a display box is provided for storing 63 dice, of which 61 have each a single word on five sides and one blank face, while the remaining 2 dice have subject prompts on every face, to be used as the inspiration for a haiku poem.

Gameplay consists of rolling all 63 dice, or some subset one chooses, and selecting among the resulting words to build a haiku. The haiku is then arranged on the outward display face of the box, with the surrounding dice rotated to show only their blank faces, allowing the completed poem to stand out visibly.

Several of the dice consist only of grammatical function words, such as prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions. Most of the dice are content words, however, either concrete things like beautiful phenomena in nature, or else abstract concepts like hope and love. The standard set from 2010 has more generalised subject matter, with greater focus on nature and families, while the 2013 set covers romantic and suggestive language, though it does not actually feature any words which individually might be judged as explicitly erotic or too mature for teens and younger players.

At a glance, there is nothing about Haikubes which uniquely singles them out to be used for haiku poetry specifically, more than any other sort of poetry, apart from a simple lack of rhyming and chiming options. The designers did not go out of their way to balance the distribution of words according to any particular syllable count, for example, and while there are some words on the dice which refer to natural phenomena, there are not so many as would corner one into only writing about nature, nor being obliged to include nature as a subject in any way in a poem.

The two different sets of Haikubes have - by my count - six dice identically in common between them, and apart from those six, five of which are grammatically functional dice, the sixth a content word die listing "man, woman, boy, girl, lips," they share no other identical dice between the two sets at all. There are, however, more than a dozen single words present in both sets, on dice which otherwise have no words in common, such as "light" and "home." This means that if one were to combine both sets to use at one time, there are several words which have weighted probability of appearing in the result of a roll.

Haikubes work better as a game than as a composition tool for serious efforts at poetry. A vocabulary of under 600 words (after accounting for duplicates) is very confining, and this constraint provides a genuine challenge when approached as a game of iterative and collaborative poetry, such as renga, tapestry poetry, and chain poetry styles of turn-taking, such as The Everything Poem. I think the game would be much improved by the addition of a timer for each turn, and while it is suitable for two players or even just one, I think it would work especially well in a group of 3-8 participants, with a selection wheel to spin for who will have the next turn, instead of going in a fixed sequence.

If one wishes to read a complete listing of every die in both sets of Haikubes, one may find it at this link, presented as a spreadsheet which can be used as a dice table. I have documented them as insurance against the occasional lost die (a likely problem, when there are 126 of them in all), and there is no reason why others should not benefit from my effort. Kindly alert me if you should find this link broken or inaccessible, and I shall repair it at my first convenience.


Iron Noder 2023, 9/30

Haikubes is already a not so great idea to begin with, but on top of that this product is very poorly executed.

First of all there are waaaay too few dice. The instructions tell you to roll all the dice and try to make a haiku, but you only have a few handfuls of dice so your word choice is extremely limited.

On top of that, they inexplicably make all the dice have a blank side. This means that about 1/6 of your dice won't have any word at all on them! This takes your already limited options and limits them even further, for no good reason! They claim this is to add "blank space" to your finished haiku, but I just call it lazy.

On top of that, their word choices are extremely bizarre and un-haiku-like. The original 2010 edition I have includes the words "thugs," "ass," "screwed," and "anal." How am I supposed to play this with my kids? Another die has a bunch of symbols on it - #@&*#!! - which I suppose is intended to represent some indeterminate swear word? How expressive.

Most bizarrely of all, despite how few dice there are, a lot of words repeat! The first time I rolled the dice, two different dice said "doctor." Who in the world is going to use the word "doctor" twice in the same haiku??? When the word selection is already so limited in so many ways, why put any doubles in there at all? There is no coherent design to the words selected - you could have thrown darts at a word list and come up with a more useful selection of words.

There are so many bizarre design decisions here, which are just inexplicable. It's like this thing was designed by aliens. In the end, these bad design choices make it really, really frustrating and difficult to come up with a workable haiku, defeating the entire purpose of this product.


I notice from Estelore's list that the less poetic words like "thugs," "ass," and "anal" have been removed from newer versions, but there is still the die with the bleeped-out swear words and there are still two dice with "doctor"!

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