Something For The Brain???
I’ve got it!
You are going to LOVE “Gorby’s Memory-Builder Coinology Game”.
It is totally amazing, astounding, incredible and fantastic, a veritable galaxy of gaming!
It’s a simple concept, something you’ll remember from your childhood, if you ever had one, a game usually played with a deck of cards — a game called “Concentration”, it’s also known as Concentration, also known as “Memory”, “Pairs”, “Twins” or “Match Game”, and it has many other names you might not have heard before, such as “Shinkei-suijaku”, which is the name I knew for it, so now you also know, and a lotta good it’ll do ya, unless you know the secret, and once the secret is known, it’s no longer a secret.
The secret is that my Memory Builder is a coin version of the kid’s card game, “Concentration”, where you put the cards face down and try to match them up — jack and jack, nine and nine, deuce and deuce — like that.
The game “Concentration” was suggested to me by the natural actions you’ll take as a Coinology Soul-Searcher whose singular Objective Job is to take Worthy Ones offline, off the grid, off the wheel, out of circulation, and fitted into an Objective Task as part of a Coinology Safari Team.
In my search for High-Grades, I turn over many coins, many many coins, and it occurred to me that it was very similar to the card game of “Concentration”, especially in the sense that once you find a goodie, you now have to locate the pile of similars to which it will be assigned.
When you have a stack of 13 or more similars, it’s time to “Harvest” your team and return any remaining coins in that stack to the search pad.
If you’re searching for Memory Builders, you’ll want to find everything in at least one pair, and in multiples of 2.
Sometimes, if your standards are really high, you won’t find more than two of anything, and sometimes not even that, as in the case of Northern Samoa and the Peurto Rican Parrot & Frog coin.
Yes, I have a few. You have but to ask.
You Can’t Get Maze-Bright
As you work and harvest your good coins, you will quite naturally want to move the shorter stacks to the front and the higher stacks to the back, which will make it less likely that you’d bump into a stack and spill it all over the place, but this action has another, more important function — it makes it impossible to memorize the field positions of the stacks, which raises the bar on memory issues.
I use my Slabbed & Graded High-Grade Examples as Helpers, Searchers, Finders, Contactors and Locators, and have them mounted in the back of my jeweler’s style workbench, lighted by a Luxo lamp with a 60 watt soft white bulb, ideal for this purpose, with another desk and another similar light to my left, making a nice general glow in the room, with an intensity where I most need it, without the heat associated with high-energy lightbulbs.
My Search Allies are carefully placed where they can observe the proceedings.
I have two Chaco Canyon in MS-66, one Philadelphia, and one Denver, along with several other favorites, also in MS-66, all of which were graded by PCGS, my favorite grading service, which charges about $35 per coin, or more in the case of some high-ticket rarities — they charge according to the value of the coin, so it’s in their best interest to value it highly, which I appreciate at the cash register.
My Slabbed High-Grade CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN coins occupy an important place on my jewelry workbench, which is set up at least partly as an Altar, and partly as a workshop space.
Gorby’s Memory Builder Game comes complete with all the parts you need to play the game, and the storage box becomes your playing field for travel, or you can lay out your game on your velvet Coinology Search Pad at home or at a Coinology Club Meeting or Playoff.
How to Play Memory Builder
Place the pieces FACE UP on your velvet Coinology Search Pad and mix them up real well, taking care not to scratch the acrylic capsules as you move them around.
You should just be looking at faces of George Washington on the coins in front of you at the moment.
Turn one coin over and note the scene depicted — let’s say you’ve turned up “Arches”. You’d then try to locate another “Arches” coin on the pad.
If you fail, you lose a turn and the next player gets to try. If you’re playing Solitaire, you try again.
If your coin matches, you remove both coins from the layout and put them aside, until you’ve gotten them all, except the last two, which better match, or you’re not playing with a full deck, as it were.
Keep in mind that you’re not playing with raw coins. These coins are well-protected in archival coin-friendly acrylic capsules with coin-friendly identifier foam rings.
You can design your very own Memory Builder Game by selecting the coins you want for your board, and the color of foam rings.
Teams are identified by the foam rings, which come in black or white.
Backgammon and Checkers both take two teams of 12 pieces, for a total of 24 pieces, 12 black, and 12 white.
Chess takes 32 pieces — two kings, two queens, four bishops, four knights, four rooks and sixteen pawns.
Memory Builder can be played on several different levels, all the way from a 24-up game to full-blown Soul Searches with raw rolls of coins.
I’ll be delivering a talk later on about how to play Memory Builder, if I can remember to mention it at the ICW, this morning.
Ah, I have an idea — I’ll read this dissertation at the ICW, thus assuring that I will automatically remember, after I’ve been reminded.
Now, that’s MY kind of memory helper!
If you decide to search for and assemble a chess set, do keep in mind how quickly a single chess set can eat up a box of acrylic capsules.
With that in mind, you’ll want to have just ONE sample out on the sales floor, and the other coins in rolls or tucked away in paper wrappings or something equally cheap, no capsules — only load them into capsules when somebody actually buys them, or you’ll find yourself taking capsules apart, and that’s never good.
Capsules & Rolls & Flips & Raw Coins
If you have every design of the U.S. Quarter on hand, you’ll have a LOT of acrylic capsules and tons and tons of boxes and rolls and flips and booklets, or you’ll figure out that you can make up a couple of chess and backgammon and checker sets with multiple coins, and that’s the best way to handle your display.
Make up two chess sets with one each of every coin design, plus one backgammon set and one checker set, and label them differently, make a distinction between the two, even though there is none, because the sale is all about the BOARD, not the pieces.
If you’re not going to use the pieces for other games, you can make them all one color, to help make the Memory Builder Game more difficult.
By the way, when you search coins, especially quarters, you want to flip them over to see the other side, right?
Okay, go ahead and flip the coin head-for-tails, but do it by the rim. Never touch the flat sides, the obverse and reverse, the face and scene. Just don’t.
The whole point of the ritualized search is to SLOW YOU DOWN.
You’ve been at lightspeed all day. Time to cool your jets and calm your inner world, let all the turmoil go, and concentrate on the coins, use their necessity to power your will.
You can use a chess set to play Memory Builder, but it has a disadvantage in that it’s divided into teams, so it makes the game a LOT easier to play, with fewer wrong guesses.
You’ll play Memory Builder on a special Large Velvet Pad.
As each scene is selected, assuming the coin is at least MS-63, you’ll start to build up piles of “clean” coins, until your stack reaches 13 or more, at which time, you’ll harvest the stack, place the 12 selected coins into a wrapper, and label the wrapper along with the number “12” with a cartouche drawn around it, to indicate that it’s a backgammon or checkers team.
If it’s going to be a chess set, it’s assembled very differently.
Coin-Match Game
I make a very specific “Memory Builder” game, with a set of very specific pieces.
Memory Builder can be played solitaire or tournament style.
It’s a solitaire style game that plays something like a combination of “Go Fish” and “Skip-Bo”, but with coins instead of cards.
You’ll find that you can also do Tarot Readings with these coins, describing the picture in detail, or making a point about its content, to get your subject to focus on the semantics and images.
Be a Winner!
Every turn of the coin is a possible winner. You’ll find yourself getting better and better at finding the coin-mates, and your game will improve in speed and timing, as your certainty grows, and your confidence gets stronger and stronger.
When you’re doing a Coinology Soul-Search, you want to choose only those coins that are GREATLY GREAT, coins for which you’ll never have to apologize.
You should be aware as you look at these coins of the significance, meaning and subtlety of semantic power they exert merely by being present in the space, and that goes double if they’re activated by the Not-So-Secret Mantra, “Om Ma Ni Pad Me Hum”, which merely reminds you to note that there’s a jewel in the middle of the lotus, how about that???
You can assemble your very own Memory Builder, with pairs of Bishops and twin Queens, and Grand Banks of Sailing Vessels or Bison, or Fish or Hiking Bardo Walkers, or Birds that Flock Together and are “of a feather”, as it were.
Be careful handling the coins, but relax a bit — clad coins are formulated to take a LOT of punishment, and they don’t typically oxidize as will the copper-coated zinc penny, but at the same time, if it has a “Mint Sheen”, it will take your thumbprint and etch it forever into the face, so don’t be careless while you’re relaxing.
The larger coin is easier to handle, easier to re-wrap the discards for turnover at the bank tomorrow.
Always have a full box of quarters on hand, in case you happen to be sitting around doing nothing.
You really don’t have to polish the coins, and I wouldn’t do it with coins that go into the capsules — they should be collectible and should be handled that way, but with coins that are going into jewelry findings such as bezels, I definitely polish them after the somewhat brutal handling they receive when they’re tucked into the bezels — I don’t mean really brutal, but they do get touched as they’re maneuvered into place and the locket is tightened.
The pictorial quarters give you so many more features and things to look at beyond just the date and condition of the coin.
There’s no need to wait to win — you’ll hit a winner in every roll, and sometimes two or three.
You don’t have to master Grading Technology, just go for the good looks.
No scratches, no dents, no blobs, no stains, no rubs, no gouges, no wear & tear and you’ve got a good coin, ready for team play and the marketplace.
Your mission, should you accept it, is to rescue souls from the wheel, and place them in work positions.
If you follow the procedure, you can perform your Bodhisattva Work in your shorts or jammies, in your own home, office, den or tree-house.
Gorby’s Money Laundry
Here’s the basic concept:
- A coin arrives in your hands, utterly clean and completely free of damage.
- That coin needs YOU to take it off-line, off the Karmic Wheel, which in turn frees the spirit associated with that coin.
- You assign the high-grade coin, meaning that you put the coin in a capsule along with 11 other teammates.
- You get the coin where it needs to go to be of service, which means placing it in a box with another similar team and selling the set to a customer with a need for better memory.
- You attend seminars to learn how to make this work for you and everyone you know.
If you’re unable to search coins or live in a country where U.S. coinage is unavailable, you can send for my “Pre-Cleaned” coins — you get only the coins you need to create the set, and you put the coins into the capules, or you can get me to do it for you at no extra charge, if you’re unable to manage it for any reason, no need to explain.
I don’t actually clean the coins, not physically. What I do is eliminate the “unworthy” or “dirty” coins, those that didn’t make the grade and can’t — they’re too far gone.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the line between “great” and “damn near great”, but I have to use that principle every single time, and most coins don’t make the grade — they go into the “reject” pile, and I’m not shy about rejecting a coin that isn’t over the top great.
I hold compassion in my heart, but rules are rules, and a VERY high level of EXTREME Mint State is the only thing that will pass muster at the Gates of Heaven & Hell.
By the way, nobody seems to notice that the two gates are side by side and look exactly alike in all respects and are, sadly, still unlabeled — you’ll have to guess or go by luck.
I Extract Clean Coins From Hell
My “Culling” or “Cleaning Service” gives you the opportunity to create a pictorial coin set of your choosing, anything from a simple “State Quarters” set all the way to a Memory Builder that works for up to four couples or eight singles or sixteen halflings.
Gorby’s Money Laundry is the most trusted name in clean, clean coins — nationwide and worldwide. The cleanest coins you ever saw, or your dirty money back!
Get with it now!
- Send for my Amazing Memory Builder Velvet Pad today, only $89.95!
- Fabulous Coins for Memory Builder at only $2 per encapsulated coin!
- Empty Capsules for Coins, only $1 per capsule, includes foam ring!
- 32-Spot Box for Memory Builder, only $18.50, includes insert!
- UNSLABBED RAW EXTREME GRADE QUARTERS, only $20 each.
You can use more than one box of coins for your Memory Builder, but it’s best to keep them stored in the box, where they will receive zero damage, unless you count the missile strikes from Russia, NoKo and Iran.
Me, I ignore it.
Nuke, Shmuke, as long as King Oedipus loves his mother, what can go wrong?
Fancy Genuine Hand-Made Belgian Linen covered storage boxes are available, my personal favorite — they look and feel like Shantung Silk, with bulbous parts and variations galore, at a whalloping $56 apiece, but worth every quarter of it.
I also have some SPECTACULAR High-Grades offered as raw coins in a double-bagged checkout-stand package which retails at $6 apiece, wholesale is $3, and you wouldn’t do that amount of work for that little money, but there it is.
I’m not trying to get paid, or it would be much more. The whole point is to get this stuff into your hands before it’s too late, which it almost is, due to a crazy person in the White House and a bunch of nasty bastards in the whore-houses of Congress.
It’s not my problem. I have a stargate and a scout ship handy, but you might not get off so easy.
I recommend you start buzzing in resonance with at least one stargate, which you can do by wearing or carrying the Chaco Canyon piece, which I offer in a .935 sterling silver or 14k gold locket, for very reasonable prices, quoted daily for obvious market reasons.
I also have VERY VERY HIGH GRADE Chaco Canyon in PCGS slabs for about $50 apiece, or you can go crazy at $200 for something that’s POP 3, meaning there are only three of them known.
Lessee — I’ve also got some super high-grade RARES, mostly island coins, which I put into bezels, either silver or 14k gold, and don’t sell any other way, not typically, and I suggest you do the same when you find the rare ones.
Almost all these quarters can be found at $1 up to about $8 in high-grade, according to the Mega Red Book, but you can get much, much more for them as jewelry — I get $39.95 for a coin in a plain silver bezel with a large bail loop, which is $20 wholesale to you.
For my coin earrings, I get $69.95 to $89.95, depending on the rarity of the coins, which translates to $35-$45 wholesale per pair, with surgical steel ear-wires.
For a pair of sterling silver ball, ring, post & nut earring backings, add $30, which means I don’t use them, too expensive, but some folks insist, so I make sure I can get ’em!
Those are my prices, meaning that they are as wholesale as it gets.
I’m on my way to create some more incredible coin game sets! See you at the ICW, 6:00 a.m. sharp, when I’ll tell you a LOT more about this incredible breakthrough!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby