Tuck Board Antics

A Game Called Tuck, Or Maybe Tuque?
Kurt Schaefer

Each Christmas I have a project that gets a bit out of control.

About five years ago I visited my Uncle Mike in Alaska. He was living in the village of Kotlik on the north mouth of the Yukon. My sister, my father, and I flew up for a Christmas visit. It was an amazing trip, but that's a story for another time. While we were visiting, Mike introduced us to a game that he played with some of the other teachers. It was called Tuck or maybe Tuque? They played it on a homemade board. It's a game a bit like Sorry, but played by teams, and with some differences in board and rules.

At the time I took some notes about the rules and about the basic layout of the board, and I thought to my self, "I should make Mike his own board and maybe a board for myself as well." That slip of paper was the seed of yet another crazy Christmas project, but it would take 5 years to germinate.

It's now or never!

This fall I found out that my Uncle Mike was going to be at my Mom's house for Christmas. I realized that a Tuck board would make the perfect Christmas gift. If I was ever going to make a board, now was the time! I rooted through my wallet, searching for the slip of paper. Where was that thing? There were bus passes with phone numbers written on them, old post-its with out-of-date addresses. The certified mail receipt from when I mailed out the check for the Isetta, a mysterious piece of foreign currency for 50 somethings (with a picture of a printing press on it) that my coworker Lubomeir had given me. I also had the price list for the German butcher in Hamden with phone numbers on the back that were probably 10 years out of date, and apparently I was supposed to meet Rachel Buerman at the Autumn Cafe at 12:30 some 12 years ago. Nice. Where the heck was that Tuck board description?

It wasn't until my second pass through the wallet that I finally found it. It had clearly gotten soaked a few times, and it was a bit the worse for wear, but was still legible! All right. We were in business.

Ken Tanaka to the rescue

The Tuck board has two sides: one has a four-player board, and the other is a six-player board. The boards consist of a set of dimples that you can put marbles in : 260 dimples in all. So the first order of business was to take my rough notes about the boards and create and a scale drawing of the board. My coworker Ken has much better Adobe Illustrator chops then I have, so one evening he took my rough sketches and turned them into an actual layout. I was on a rather tight schedule, so I was very glad Ken could help me with that piece of the plan. The basic construction plan was something like this:

Lay out the board.
Print the layout at full size, and tape it together into a single big pattern.
Tape that on some 1/2" press board, and use a spring loaded center punch to transfer all the centers.
Drill 9/64" holes through all the center punches, and then follow that up with a 5/8" spade bit to make a final template.
Then use my plunge router, a 1/2" core box bit, and a 5/8" collar to plunge all the dimples into the final board.

Off to the the hardwood lumber yard

I wanted to make the board out of some nice wood. It seemed silly to spend SO much time making the templates, only to route the final board out of fiberboard or something. (although that would have been massively simpler.) I went to wander the somewhat gloomy hardwood aisles at Minton's. I wanted to get something that wasn't to "loud" since I didn't want the wood to overpower the game markings. So zebra wood and purple heart were right out. My original idea was to go with curly maple. However all Minton's had was birdseye maple. That also has a nice figure to it even though it was a bit fancier than I had originally envisioned. I had done some calculations and figured out how much wood I'd need. So I bought a length of maple 1x5 and a cherry 1x1 to use as the border.

Reality horns in on the design

I was originally going to make the game 3 board widths wide. So we scaled the pattern to produce a 15" wide hexagon. However after looking at the spacing, I realized that that would force the dimples to be less then 5/8" apart, which would make it impossible to drill the template. (Since all the holes would over lap) Yikes! No worries, I could just buy a bit more of that board, and make it 4 board widths wide. This thing was going to be huge! I went back to Mintons, only to discover that they had chopped the remainder of my board into 1' lengths! I needed 18". Oh, the Humanity! So I ended up having to buy a chunk of a different board that didn't match super well. Oh well, so the hexagon wouldn't be exactly hexagonal. No worries. I also ended up having to do the four-player board template twice because even at the new bigger size, the spacing was just a tad under 5/8". Boy, that was a lot of extra center punching and drilling that could have been avoided.

I used the depth stop on the drill press to limit the travel of the spade bit, so it would just break the bottom surface, and I drilled with a second board behind the template board. That way there was no tearout at the back of the board, but it did produce a zillion 'O' shaped pieces of wood. By the time I was done the bench looked like a Spagetti O's explosion down at the Chef Boyardee plant. You might notice my templates aren't hexagonal. I had to cut various notches into them so that my drill press could actually reach the innermost holes of the templates. So the corners form the actual hexagon, but there are a bunch of random divots nibbled out around the edge.

The board comes together

So then there was a period of frantic cutting, biscuit joining, gluing and clamping. I cut one of the biscuit slots wrong, but a second cut, and some shims to pad out the biscuit made that come out okay. Then there was a period of interminable sanding. I was out in the semi-dark carport, sitting on a log, the board on a scrap of cardboard, going over it again and again with the random orbit sander. 80 grit 100 grit 150, 240. Touchdown! That's always been my least favorite part of wood working, the zillion hours of sanding. Now I finally had the proper hexagon.

Plunging into the pits

So then it was time to clamp on the templates and start routing all those dimples. I chucked up my 1/2" core box bit, locked in the 5/8" collar, set the depth adjustment, and away I went. I soon realized I had to plunge with some gusto or the dimple would be slightly burned. The first few dimples I ended up routing twice (the second time with a slightly deeper setting) to clean up a few early burn marks. Plunge, plunge, plunge. Suddenly I noticed that my plunges were taking a bit longer, and I realized the depth stop had slipped. I was lucky it hadn't slipped further, or I might have plunged right through. I guess 260 plunges with gusto was a few plunges too many, or at least for the kind of stop my Bosch router has. I reset the stop and tightened it up super snug; it didn't move on me again. Still there are a few dimples on that board that are a bit deeper than most. They are not very noticeable though.

Final markings

I wanted to keep the look very clean, so I used my wood burning pencil to put the lines on the board. After burning the lines, I did some more 240 grit sanding to make the lines nice and clean. (That removes the little bit of char that can happen around the line itself.) There were also certain dimples on the board that needed to be marked: the dimples of the home row, and the one which is the "exit from home" position on the board. My idea for doing this was to burn the dimples in some nice way, but how? What I came up with was to machine a 1/2" rod, so that it had a hemisphere on the end and then center drill that. I did this on the lathe, first rough cutting the hemisphere and then filing it round and sanding it to a nice finish. (I don't have a radius turning attachment.) Then I center-drilled it and cut it to the right length so I could chuck it into the router. Then I could simply locate the router over a dimple by plunging with the router off (so that the stub mated with the dimple) and then fire up the router for a couple of seconds to burn the wood.

I needed to burn 50 of the dimples, and it would have gone pretty quickly except that I had to clean burnt wood out of the center hole after every burn so the hole wouldn't fill up and stop producing those nice white centers. If I had it to do again, I'd put a bit more of a shoulder on the burning tool. That way there would always be a crisp round outter edge to it. As it was the burnt dimples looked good, but any tiny misalignment of the burning tool resulted in a slightly uneven edge. Not a big deal, but a nice uniform edge would have been better.

Finish before it's to late

So then I had to finish the project, and time was running out. I put three coats of gloss polyurethane on. That really brought out the figure of the wood. Putting the first coat on was absolute magic. It was like painting a sky full of clouds with every stroke. I put the last coat of finish on ten hours before we were to fly back east for Christmas. I setup a fan to blow across the board and went to bed. Cheryl and I got up in the dark hours before dawn and headed for the airport.

I put two sweaters over the board to protect it and carried it under my arm as if it were a giant pile of winter clothing. It fit though the X-Ray machine with only about 1 1/2" to spare. I was nervous because I was exceeding the carry-on dimensions, but no one stopped me. The X-Ray machine guy asked me if I'd put linseed on the board, but what he was smelling was the cloud of polyurethane fumes that was enveloping us. And thus the board was lugged from San Jose, to O'Hare, and finally to Knoxville. When we arrived, Stan noted that I was apparently traveling with my own "toilet seat."

Christmas day approaches

So I finally managed to remove the sweaters and get the board wrapped in gift wrap. I then stuck it rather conspicuously next to the tree. *phew* mission accomplished. The day before Christmas, we were sitting around the dinner table, and Mike pointed out the wrapped board. He said that it was just the size of a Tuck board. He went to to explain that he used to play Tuck when he lived in Kotlik, but that now that he didn't live there he didn't have access to a board any more. He was thinking about asking his brother Roy to make one. Mike didn't remember that we'd played Tuck when we visited him five years earlier, or that I had taken enough notes to reproduce the board! It was all I could do to keep a straight face as he talked about the game. Must ... drink ... tea ... Must not grin. It was exciting because I knew that at least that gift was going to go over well. *phew*

The Tuck rules

Here are the Tuck rules as introduced by David Sr. & Judy Voisine to the staff of Kotlik School, Kotlik, Alaska.

Four Players - Use one complete deck of cards including two jokers. Players form two two-person teams.
Six Players - User one and a half decks (six complete suits) and 3 jokers. Players form two three-person teams.

Sit around the table, alternating team members. One player deals single cards face up around the table until the first jack is reached. Player receiving first jack gets first deal.

Dealer deals first round of hand: Five card hands in the first round, four card hands in subsequent rounds. Player to dealer's left plays 1 card into the middle of the board and moves one marble as described below. If on marbles can be moved using the cards in a player's hand, the hand is discarded and the player is skipped until the next hand. When all cards in the first round have been played or thrown in, the same dealer deals the second round of hands. Same dealer continues until the entire deck has been dealt, then deal moves to the next player to the left.

Here is a description of what the various cards can do. Being able to "open" means the card can be used to move a marble from the starting row over to the staring hole. All moves are clockwise except for Four's.

Aces - move 1 (or open)
Fours - Move backward 4 spaces
Sevens - Move 7 "killing" all marbles in the path (returning them to the starting row)
Jacks - Switch two marbles' locations or move 11
Queens - Move 12
Kings - Move 13 (or open)
Jokers - move 20, passing through any blocks (or open) You also receive an extra card from the dealer and take an extra turn.
Other Cards - Move the number spaces indicated on the card.

Additional Rules:

Landing on a hole occupied by a marble "kills" that marble.
Marbles in their starting holes cannot be passed (this is called a "block"), switched using a jack, or killed. (with the exception that they can be passed by a joker)
If a joker is played that can't actually move any marbles it still draws an additional card and an additional turn.
All cards in a hand must be used to make moves if possible. Exception: If using a jack to make a switch is the only possible move in a hand, the hand may be thrown in. That is, a jack doesn't have to used as a switch.
A player with all four marbles in safely home plays moving his/her partner's marbles.
To position a marble into a space in the home row the marble must land exactly on the space of the home row. So for example a marble two spaces from the end of the home row can't be moved ahead those final two spaces by playing a five. An actual two is needed.
Marbles in the home row block one another, so they can't skip over each other or pass, to get to an open hole. This makes Aces very popular near the end game.
Marbles in the home row are safe and can't be killed or swapped

The Tuck Board patterns

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