If Dice Throne were a video game, it would be fine. Instead, as a board game, it’s a delicious modular experience. Or, to put it concisely, it’s a board game where you want to eat all the pieces (as Noor put it.) Every part of the game is modular and customizable, down to the tokens your characters use. This is a perfect game for a casual group looking for easy fun while still encouraging skillful play.
In Dice Throne, players select a unique character with their own set of dice, condition tokens (the yummy pieces), and board. You may choose the intricate artificer, who must juggle summoning bots that augment his actions alongside distributing nanites to damage opponents; or maybe you’ll play as the gunslinger, who’s singular purpose is to dish out as much damage as possible. Depending on the number of players, you may be in an all out 1v1, a tactical 2v2, or a 5-person slugfest. Each character and player count offers a unique ruleset and gameplay, creating a textured possibility of gameplay, ranging from games where single mistakes cost you the game, and others where it’s an absolutely chaotic shitshow.
BATTLE YAHTZEE
In case it isn’t clear, everything about this game is customizable – but what is the core gameplay loop actually like? At first glance, this may seem more like Magic: the Gathering than Yahtzee – there’s a deck, you have a hand, life total, a resource to play cards… While this is all true, none of that matters.
On your turn, you have 3 rolls, yahtzee style (you may set aside dice you wish to keep between rolls) to match your character’s abilities printed on the board. Each die has 1-6, but each side also has a symbol on it. Typically, a character’s die has 3 symbols – one showing up 3 times (1-3), one showing up twice (4-5), and one showing up only on 6’s. After your first roll, you’re often presented with a choice – play it safe to do a consistent but relatively weak attack utilizing your most common symbol, or gamble in your subsequent rolls to use a higher power move that inflicts debuffs/gains buffs. Some characters have minigames to deal more damage with their tokens, others just grant more damage. These high powered moves are precarious, however, and sets up a clear risk-reward: fail to roll the powerful dice, and you’re left with unusable junk. To sum it all up simply, on your turn, you get 3 rolls to use your abilities to kill your opponent(s) before they kill you.
What about all that other stuff?
Everything else in the game serves to complement the battle yahtzee – the cards you play can be upgrades to make your rolled abilities stronger, or tricky cards that mess up your opponent’s dice. Skill expression comes into the game here, asking players to manage their cards and combat points carefully. Both of these resources are scarce, and while that may sound out of place in an otherwise straightforward game, instead augments the core gameplay loop of rolling dice. For players like myself, this does present a puzzle in how to optimally spend these resources, but for less engaged players, they can sell the cards they dislike to play more cards they do like.
GAMEPLAY FEEL
Ultimately, Dice Throne succeeds in its creation of a system where both the complex and simple can coexist and not disrupt the balance. It accomplishes this via commonality between characters and streamlining of decision making. Even with the significant strategic differences between characters, they all have many things in common. Every character has the same ability skeleton, with an ultimate (requires 5 6’s,) a “basic attack” (uses 1-3’s, scales with the amount rolled,) a small straight (4 consecutive dice,) a large straight (5 consecutive dice,) and a defense roll (can be used when attacked.) There are other common themes, most of the cards in the deck are generic ones all characters have, and several characters share tokens as well (bleed is a common one, that three different characters have.) This allows for players to switch what characters they play with relative ease, and can fall back on their previously learned knowledge. This in turn serves to streamline decision making as well – if you have a card that messes with an opponents’ dice, you have a vague sense of what is very good for them and what’s bad.
There are several other key streamlined moments present in Dice Throne. Analyzing the board state is deceptively straightforward – there may be 5 different characters and 15 different tokens, but can be distilled into a quick valuation. You don’t need to care about what buffs everyone else has, nothing will instantly kill you, and all you need to care about is putting good tokens on your board, and getting rid of the bad ones opponents put there. This, combined with character commonality, means the board state is rarely, if ever, overwhelming. Finally, deciding who you are attacking is determined by a roll of the dice, ensuring that 5/6 times, you don’t have a choice. No need to worry about who is the strongest or the weakest, as that critical danger assessment is rarely asked of you in Dice Throne.
Ok but what about Fortnite?
In many ways, Dice Throne presents the modular experience that Fortnite does. There are many different ways to play, different difficulty and engagement levels, and a high level of self-expression in the characters you play. Customers can buy characters in packs of 2, offering an out-of-the-box game for 2 people. The wide range of characters mean that everyone can find a character that they love and just buy that. And the price seems affordable – $30 for a board game is very reasonable. However, that number goes up steeply – for 6 players to have one choice of character, you’re looking at $90. Dice Throne is really great if you own all 26 characters, but the price of that is pretty damn high. Without all of them, it’s less great. And, like Fortnite, every aspect of it is monetized if you want it to be. There are sleeves for each character, playmats for each character, dice trays for each character, etc. The a-la-carte system seen both in Dice Throne and Fortnite allows for crossovers from different IP’s as well. Although Dice Throne has a clear fantasy mashup vibe in its characters, the Marvel crossover characters don’t feel out of place at all in the dice rolling game. If you want Dice Throne to be the Marvel Dice game, it can be that for you, just like Fortnite can be the game where you get to play as Darth Vader or John Cena. In many ways, it represents the ultimate commodification of board games, and although I love it dearly, extreme commodification has its consequences (that’s a whole different post though.)
Thanks for reading!
