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