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Dice. They’ve been around since before proper recorded history, with Egyptians using sticks with numbers on as a form of dice to play senet before the year 3000BCE. For many of us, we were probably introduced to dice through roll-and-move games like Monopoly or Ludo/Frustration, or push your luck games like Yahtzee.
But dice can be and do so much more in games. Here we’ve collected together five games with dice as a central component, but where they’re used in some interesting and innovative ways!
Glow - Andy Broomhead
Glow is an interesting adventure game where you’re trying to remove the darkness from the world by travelling around collecting slivers of light, restoring colour to the monochrome landscape and visiting landmarks, all to try and score the most points.
I’ll be honest and say that roll-and-move is an aspect of this game, but it’s much more than rolling a four to move four spaces. You start with a set of colourful dice that you can add to throughout the game. Each represents different elements, and combinations of rolls will allow you to travel around.
Each turn sees you adding to your dice pool by drafting a companion and some dice from the meeting place. Before you’ve moved, you can activate card abilities depending on the combinations you’ve rolled – so your roll has multiple uses. The conditions depend on certain symbols being present or absent in your rolls and can score you bursts of light (points), footprint tokens which act as wild symbols for movement, re-roll tokens and more.
This is really nice – you end up with varying pools of different sized, colourful dice and you get to trigger all sorts of combos and effects, as well as use them to explore the world and pick up some bonuses too.
If that’s not enough, Glow comes with a dual-sided board that gives you the option to play as an adventurer wandering the world on foot, or sailing around an island archipelago. Both use mostly the same idea, though movement on the sailing boats requires much more specific rolls and is probably a lot tougher.
Glow is a great bridge between rolling and moving, and being able to change and adapt what you roll to get the most from it. You can retreat on the score track to get free re-rolls if you need them, and you can also pick particular strategies based on the companions you befriend upon the way. The art is really superb too with some great creatures depicted on the cards.
Zombie Dice – Dan Street-Phillips
Braaaiiiins!! That infamous call that goes back to the early days of cinema as the undead slowly hobble towards their soon-to-be lunch. Zombies have been used in many games including big box mammoths like Zombiecide or Dead of Winter or smaller games like the amazing children’s legacy experience Zombie Kidz Evolution. There is something about these lovable killers that make for great characters. Zombie Dice takes these deteriorating dummies and makes them the main characters of a push your luck dice rolling game.
Dice are one of the most satisfying mechanisms in the table top hobby. The sound of the old ivories hitting the table, the crunch of them in your hand, there is an energy to the roll and an excitement about the unknown. Zombie Dice is simple. In turn, players will roll three dice. On each cube there are three possible outcomes. A run. A gunshot. And a brain. The brains are what you are after. As zombies you feed on them so the more you have the better. These are the victory points in the game and the first to a set total will win. A run symbol means that your victim got away from you so nothing happens. But a gunshot could kill you if you ever took three on a turn.
Much like Yahtzee you will be drafting dice, drawing back upto three dice with each roll. However, unlike the classic title, if you ever get three gunshots you will lose all of the brains you have stored up that turn. Push your luck games are exciting but can quickly turn on a dime and be incredibly punishing, but with Zombie Dice, a game is so short that you can just jump into another go. And if the dice aren’t going your way, the chaos of the dice will just make you moan and groan to the point of true immersion!
Perudo – Pete Bartlam
Perudo has been described by Stephen Fry as the second most addictive thing to come out of South America! I don’t know about that but it certainly grabs you when you play. Everyone I convince to try it, loves it. I say convince because describing it fails to get across the excitement until you try it (A bit like the number 1 addictive thing, I guess!)
So, here goes. Essentially it is Liar’s Dice, another variant of which, Bluff, won the 1993 Spiel des Jahres. Each player has 5 dice, secretly rolls them and covers them with their cup. They then bid on the total number of dice of one number under the cups. So 6 players, 5 dice each I’ll bid five 3s. But wait a minute any 1s count wild so better make that ten 3’s! The next player can either bid more than ten 3’s or ten or more of a higher number. Bids spiral upwards until someone calls the bluff and all dice are revealed. If the last bid is right the caller loses a die, if not not the bidder loses one. Lose all 5 dice and you’re out.
And so it continues with an ever-decreasing total of dice until one player remains victorious. So far, so prosaic you may say. Where’s the fun in that? The fun, my doubting friend, lies in the bluff! Only you know your dice. You know the total number of dice in play but not what the others have. Your bid is their only clue to your dice so play it straight or deceive? If, in the previous example, you’d rolled 3, 3, 3, 2, 1 – essentially four 3’s, 3 more than average, do you raise your bid to thirteen 3’s or keep it low? You decide!
Tension ratchets up with each bid until someone calls – Dudo apparently – and the denouement ensues.
Try it. You’ll like it but don’t blame me if you get hooked!
Taverns Of Tiefenthal – Pete Earnshaw
Ah the magic of board games! You can become an architect, a zoo owner or the ruler of an ancient civilisation all from the comfort of your home. Ok, so you will probably struggle to get an actual career in any of these sectors on the basis of “I was good at it in a board game” but it’s fun to pretend and to live in these imaginary scenarios even if just for an evening. So when I think about my pick of a truly great dice game, I immediately think back to those crisp summer nights with a nice glass of beer, sat at the table running an oldie worldy pub in TAVERNS OF TIEFENTHAL! I’ll never be a pub landlord, but in this game I can be a truly successful one. The beauty of TOT is that it combines several styles of game and blends them together beautifully like a Belgian Lambic. Part deckbuilding and part dice placement, TOT is a thematic and gorgeous looking game that may look a little intimidating at first but once you get the core concept figured out it is surprisingly quick to learn.
Players will be working smarter, not harder, to manage their income and the amount of beer in the cellar to take a run down little tavern where you can’t even afford to employ a dishwasher, into a thriving hot spot which attracts the local nobility. To achieve your goal it’s all in the dice, with the wrong dice you can’t activate your cards or action spaces so once you roll the dice you really need to choose wisely. But be careful, after you’ve taken one die you will pass the beer coaster holding the remaining die to the player next to you while you receive theirs. You’re guaranteed a satisfying gaming experience.
Orlog – Luke Pickles
Alright, you want dice games? I’ll GIVE you a dice game. A dice game that’s not just a touch cleverer than your average roll and move, oh no. It’s so dang smart, it started life as a mini-game in a video game! That’s right! We have game-ception! Similar in playstyle to Yahtzee and Dice Throne, Orlog, a dice game straight out of Assassins Creed Valhalla, is a game where two players are chucking dice in the hope of knocking the opponent down to zero health. However, in the twist from Dice Throne, where players take their turns rolling their dice three times, in Orlog, the players will roll their dice three times in a round in an alternating fashion. The reasoning behind this is that the die faces are symbols: arrows; axes; shields; helmets; and grabby hands. You choose which dice you keep, using the arrows and axes to attack, the shields and helmets to defend and the grabby hands to steal favour tokens from your opponent. More on that in a second. But because you’re alternating your rolls, your opponent has a chance to defend against what you’re planning to do. Two arrows can be blocked by two shields. An axe is deflected off a helmet. You get the idea.
Some of the symbols have little dashed lines around them, which will grant you additional favour tokens, which, combined with those you stole from your opponent, will allow you to trade in to the gods you chose at the start of the game to activate a special power. This could be healing, trickery or just a good old-fashioned smiting. The last player standing wins. I think this is a brilliant little filler game which plays luck and strategy just right. Not bad for a video game’s mini game.