Top 10 Mechanisms: Dice Games

in a recent video blog I talked about the broad range of board games that are available for modern players I I had so many to cover that I didn't actually get on to talking about card games and dice games so this particular video blog is going to be specifically about the full range of dice games and that is in itself a very diverse category of games when we look back two days gone by and the sort of games we used to play as children and certainly the sort of games that people still buy from toys-r-us and the various different toys shops and and mass-market stores now those games will often feature rolling a dice in order to move a number of spaces around a board when we think about things like monopoly include or game of life these games always involve that roll and move mechanic that has become very outdated in recent years to the point where now it's almost extinct but a few games still hang on to that type of mechanic formula D is really the epitome of roll and move games in the modern era now this game itself is not actually a very new game it's been around for a long time but it still has a hold in the current sort of market it still recognized as a quality game and it's because of the ingenious way that it implements that roll a move system in fact there's no other game quite like it this is a racing car game so we have Formula One racing cars moving around the trick and the track and the way that they move is is as with any sort of roller move game we roll dice in order to move around the track now we start off by rolling a four-sided dice which allows us to only move one or two spaces depending on what we roll so that is our first gear so here's our gear box we're in first gear we roll in the yellow dice when I step up into second gear I'm going to be going faster so I'm going to be roll in the orange dice which has numbers between two to four on it when they go up to the next to third gear and I'm going to be rolling the red dice which is eight sided and then up to the 12 sided dice here and then we go on up to the 20-sided dice and eventually when I'm in sixth gear I'm going to be rolling a thirty sided dice will swim into sixth gear so this is the thirty sided dice by which point I'll be flying around the track so push your luck aspect though because if you go around the corners too fast you're gonna crash so you have to moderate your speed using these gear sticks it's an ingenious system and a lot of marrakesh is perhaps a much simpler implementation of that roll a move system much more sort of child friendly family friendly and then Formula D although that it's not in itself a complicated game so in marrakesh we're using this big chunky dice with essentially numbers on it although they're these Moroccan symbols and we roll the dice and then depending on what we've rolled we can move this chap here that many spaces at one to three spaces and all the time that he's moving he's leaving behind him these little rugs that eventually will sort of populate the board so if we roll again he goes here and then he might leave another rug and depending on the players the different colors are laid down when he lands on these rugs other players are going to score points so as the board becomes filled up then rolling this dice is potentially perilous because he might land on a rug of your opponent's color which means you've got to give their money as a sort of descendant of the role of move games of the past modern games have sometimes used a random number generator so essentially it's it's like a roller move we roll the dice and then depending on what is rolled on that single dice then certain things might happen now this is still a slightly unusual aspect in modern board games but it is it was used in Settlers of Catan which was perhaps the most significant euro game that really sparked this whole new wave of modern board games so that as a transition from the games of the past with the role of move mechanics the very related similar idea of rolling a dice as a random number generator to then and to then sort of generate information that drives the the game built around it Matt Socorro is the game that has really taken settlers of catan number generator sort of system for for generating resources and and so on and and run with it so this is a more recent game it's been out for the last couple of years this is a deluxe version in a nice tin with a couple of expansions in there it's really a beautiful game and very simple to play in this game you build these different buildings which are based on cards which which which you purchase throughout the game and then you roll the dice each turn and if it rolls a certain number so for example if you rolled a three your cafe would activate or if you're older nine your winery would activate but the beauty of the game is when you roll that number not only do your own cards activate but your opponent's cards might activate as well depending on what's written on them when they activate different powers happen you might gain money you might take money from your opponents and you might generate other powers that help you in some way and so you build up an engine throughout the game and each time you roll that dice although it's random in terms of you're waiting for a certain dice roll you can set up a system whereby every dice roll or at least most dice rolls are going to be helpful to you in some way and then you rely on the luck of those dice rolls in order to generate the resources and ultimately the points that you need of course aside from roll and move the other big dice game that we'll remember as children or from years gone by is Yahtzee so Yahtzee being a case of rolling some dice trying to score doubles you know pairs triples different combinations of dice but having a series of three rolls in order to achieve that so that Yahtzee has a Yahtzee has become a mechanic in its own right it's as well as being a game is become a mechanic which is then utilized in modern games now then comes up a lot these games all utilize that Yahtzee based mechanism in some way or other and the idea of rolling dice memory roll in them in order to achieve certain results but each of these games experiments with that mechanic in some way or other some of them more successfully than others these are not all great games some of them are very good but they are all interesting games in that they all experiment with that basic formula for example pirate and Cap'n is a very simple system where you're rolling the dice in order to achieve set results but each turn a new card is turned over that changes those results that are necessary in some way or other very very simple variation on the theme and the others will do things that are similar this one over here which is called to court the King in English and and more recently has been released in a big box as favor of the Pharaoh really experiments with all different aspects of that Yahtzee mechanism and gives you special powers and things like this it's a it's a real exploration of the Yahtzee genre and Viva Java the dice game tries to do something really interesting with a push your luck aspect to it there's a greater degree of complexity in this game but the pieces are beautiful and the game is a much richer experience than some of these is sort of lighter fare here this one ninja dice comes in a particularly nice package a little soft foamy sort of case that's full of dice often these games are played turn-by-turn each player will take their turn and they might have several rerolls so with a large number of players turns can really drag so it's nice when a game introduces an aspect of sort of interaction of players being involved when it's not their turn and Werfel Bonanza is a particularly good example of that all players need to watch the dice results because everybody can benefit from the dice results that one player rolls not just the player that's rolling them himself the next biggest group of dice games often using that Yahtzee style roll and re-roll mechanic that take that games so when we talk about take that games amongst the board games that's often part of the so-called mirror trash genre heavy conflict attacking other players so my actions benefit me but they also harm the other players and I take great enjoyment in that that's the idea of the take that genre several of the dice games fall into that genre they may use the artsy mechanic they may not but specifically my dice role is to attack you as the opponent in these games players dice results might directly attack an opponent and take what they've sort of been gathering so for example King's gold a very simple example in this sort of genre and I'm you're part of the attraction of this game perhaps the most significant thing of all is the beautiful engraved images on the dice really thick large chunky dice and then these fantastic sort of coins these gold coins and that's all the components in the game but the game is largely about rolling certain results on these dice in order to take coins to steal them from your opponents to steal them from the bank to return them to your to the bank and and you know and manipulating the position of these coins it's a sort of mean but very quick and a lot of fun game very very simple and sort of beautiful production from blue orange heck MEK this is heck make extra worm because this has got the this is the expansion set but heck MEK uses these these nice little sort of bakelite tiles and with pictures of worms on them and the dice have that have worms on as well and you're rolling the dice in order to claim to claim worms from a sort of barbecue grill of pieces its if this is one of the sort of classics and there's honor a Ryan it's your game it's a fantastic game you can't go wrong with this I mean of this epitomises dice games really and how far they've they've sort of come in in using that sort of it does use Yahtzee like mechanisms of roles and rerolls but there's something more mathematical about it there's still a lot of randomness in it is still a very light game but it's something that feels more substantial and it's a beautiful production as well Sushi's often sock in Gockel wok is almost a sort of sequel really I suppose it certainly comes from the same sort of world as heck Meck Meck Meck is also known as pick Amano in in the sort of english-speaking countries but again this has these bakelite tiles and it's a game about about chickens and sushi this one perhaps is even more take that even more about stealing things off your opponents and attacking your opponent's pieces but again works brilliantly a lot of the Yahtzee type dice games will utilize a system where when I roll a certain result or mark that off on a sheet of paper and then on future turns I'll be looking for a different result the overall game being trying to fulfil all the different boxes on my sheet of paper in order to show that I've rolled all of those different results throughout the course of the game so this features in games like quicks was a very popular recent one but there are many minigames that fall into this genre and Yahtzee itself is an example of that type of game in eine farc t arish each player will take the role of one of these creatures on the top here so I've chosen to take the role of the mouse so I've circled the mouse here and I've crossed off that line because I can't score points in that line what I'm trying to do is score crosses in all five boxes of any one of the other creatures and the other players each have their own score sheets and they'll be trying to do the same thing so what I do on my turn is I take these these six dice here and I roll them now I have to do this three times throughout my turn and on one of those rolls I must keep one dice on another roll I keep two dice and on another roll I keep three dice so in this instance I'm going to keep a single Mouse so that's my one dice that I've kept I now roll again and I must keep two of these results now I'm trying to avoid these policemen because if I end up with two policemen at the end of the round then that my round doesn't count so I'm going to keep the two mice because remember I am the mouse character now my final roll I'm going to have to keep all three of these and there we are I've got a and I've got a dog and I have a policeman what happens here is the whatever I rolled the most of that player is going to score so in this instance that happens to be me so I'm gonna score and I'm scoring one dog I don't score anything for a policeman so I'll cross off one dog and then it goes on now if I'd rolled you know a majority of someone else's symbol then they would score even though it was my turn in Roman poker there will be a score pad like this and they'll be you put your players initials on the top here each player is trying to fill up the entire row with scores and the scores have to go in increasing number order so starting from the lowest going down to the highest and you can position your score in any of these rows on your individual turn what you're doing on your turn is rolling one of these Roman numeral dice so here I've rolled an eye and then I can roll again another one and each time all I need to make sure is that I can arrange what I've rolled into a valid Roman numeral so III is valid so XII when out 12 that's a valid Roman numeral so that's keep rolling XIII so we're now at 13 let's keep going that's 23 and that's roll again X now that is not a valid Roman numeral and because that would have to be a four would be IV so I've gone bust by rolling that I've pushed my luck too far I could have stopped and just taken that 23 in which case I would have entered it into one of these panels and where two entry is the real trick because it's got to be an ascending order so if I put it here then I can no longer place anything between 7 and 23 row in fact anything lower than 23 I wouldn't be able to place on this chart so it is careful positioning that it needs to take place once an entire row has been filled up by one player all players add up their points and the person with the most points is the winner but there are also action cards that change certain aspects of play throughout the game so you can you can alter your dice rolls using these action cards some morrow takes this mechanism one step further in this game which is slightly more complex each player has their own city board which they use a sort of dry white marker to write on so if we've wiped clean at the end of each game and we're rolling dice to build walls to build churches and houses and gather resources and and defend against incoming pirates it's a it's a sort of Euro resource management game with Yahtzee in there and this sort of a raisable game board it's simple to play quite quick to play and a very enjoyable game but with slightly more depth than the other games that I've just shown you with in this genre of course dice games aren't always small games there are some quite significant large sort of boxed games which are also dice games so within the worker placement genre of Euro games which is a genre of games where you place pieces onto the board in order to gather certain resources there is a subsection called dices placement games so in dice placement games you'll place a dice onto the board and the results showing on the dice will generate different resources - if I place some other results so it's similar to the worker placement genre but with this added sort of random element of the dice and dice manipulation used within that action selection Kingsburg is a more complicated sort of game a lot going on so I'm only going to show you very briefly how pretty the game is so if we have a look at the board here you can see all these different people who live in this place Kingsburg and when we roll the results that are indicated on the board we place the dice to claim those spaces and then we get the resources associated with them and of course with those resources you can build various different buildings and activate cards and fight bad guys and all sorts so this is an example of the dice placement of genre more complex again is tois which is again a dice place gain if we have a look at the back of the box here you can see that board and how we place the dice into various regions on the board this allows us to place meatballs these little wooden people onto the board in order to claim various areas of the board and get resources and fight off of events that go on this is a quite an involved euro game that uses dice some extremely clever way so it's a it's a hefty game a sort of main event on game night as opposed to a lot of these other dice games which are over in 10 minutes and basically serve as a sort of filler or entree to the to the later main course some dice games are not competitive at all we talked about take that games earlier but now there are also cooperative dice games it seems to lend itself quite well to two to cooperative games because cooperative games you don't have an opponent so if we have that random generator which is the dice that takes the last sort of an artificial intelligence that takes the role of the opponent we're playing against the dice which means that the players can all be in it together facing off against their sort of fiction provided by the game generated by this AI which is the dice pandemic the cure is the dice game version of the of the very popular cooperative game pandemic and look at all the I mean there's there's a ton of these this is just a small selection of the beautiful custom dice that exist in this game and there's a big push your luck aspect again we're trying to save the world from a spreading disease and we're doing it cooperative it's a lovely game and equally as good as its as its board game alternate version and that in fact I think this is this is in my eyes this is a more entertaining game here we have d-day dice which is a cooperative game about advancing up the the up the beaches so we have a board like this and we're rolling various different dice of different colors in order to gain soldiers and dice here will move slowly up from the beginning from the beach and trying to go up and avoiding machine-gun fire and so on as we attempt to get up to the bunker at the top here so that's d-day dice which is an excellent cooperative dice game with lots of different beaches and so lots of different missions of sort of varying difficulty levels a smaller cooperative game is 8 epochs which is by can I who is the the chap who who made love letter and and all those other sort of lovely Japanese games this comes in a tiny box it has a few wooden dice like this and the sort of classic cannae artwork that you see in all of his games like chronicle and love letter and so on and here we're rolling dice in order to activate these different characters to fight off a series of different battles and illnesses and diseases and and some catastrophes that are sort of afflicting the universe it's a very small game these are all the cards that are in the game so sort of a micro game of a cooperative dice game the other category of big box dice games is the dice drafting games now this is where the dice rolling itself is not the most important bit in the game the dice are all rolled and then players will draft these dice now that means they're going to select the dice from the central pool of rolled dice and then depending on the dice that they've selected certain things will happen these are examples of dice drafting games castle dice being what I classically think of as a dice drafting game so here this is this game which comes in a ridiculously large box has a massive number of dice in it an absolute ton of dice and they've all got different resources printed on them and so when you everyall players roll dice together and then they each select these dice which affects how many resources they've got to build buildings and and gain special abilities it's a game that I personally find a little bit slow and long but essentially it does have that dice drafting thing I like games where that dice drafting is used in a slightly different way and so these are games that are related but that's certainly not the same here we have hide now this is a very interesting game I think it's a Korean game hide hidden identity dice espionage in this game that central pool of dice that are rolled I'll have one secret dice hidden away and the other players are trying to guess what it isn't assassinated and so when I select a dice from that individual draft of dice that individual pool of dice that have been rolled in the center that's going to give other players information about my own dice and it's going to give me the opportunity to try and assassinate their dice and guess what their dice result is showing what dice they've got it's it's a really nice production it looks great again lots of custom dice lots of nice sides on those you know alternate sides now they're not too standard e6 six sided dice this is Las Vegas Las Vegas this is actually Las Vegas Boulevard which is the expansion to Las Vegas this is a I was trying to work out which category to put it in but Isis I sort of think of this as a dice drafting game although you don't have a pool of dice that all players drafter on when you roll your dice you have your own selection of diesen you can only use a small subset of them so you're you're drafting from within your own pool and then placing them and it turns into an almost an area majority game let me show you how it works in Las Vegas what I do on my turn is roll all of these dice so all dice of my color so I roll them all and then I look at the results and all matching results of any particular number can be placed onto the corresponding casino so for example I could place all of my threes onto the three casino and I have to place all of them I can't place some of them or I could place all of my sixes for example onto the six casino down here and other players are then going to do the same thing so it's now the next players turn their rolls and then he decides okay he's going to try and compete with me on the sixes so he places a six into the six casino down here as well and what we're doing here is we competing to take a share of this money that's along here now at the moment Green is winning because he has more on that six casino if we get to a situation where there is a tie then that these these dice are neutralized so none of these dice count because they're tied so if the red player could get in with a single six he would now win on this casino because ties don't count otherwise we're looking for majorities and then the player with the most dice on particular casino will take the highest value money and money is points at the end of the game and so that's how the game works it's a load of fun rolling the dice placing them your turns move quickly it makes a lot of sense but there's a lot of strategy in terms of which casino do I pick do I go for the high reward and but also high risk or do I go for the low value things there's a lot of pushing and luck and a lot of really messing over your opponents by neutralizing their dice we're creating these tight situations closely related to the dice drafting games of the dice pool building game so these are based on the old deck building games like Dominion which have been around for the last few years very popular card games when you generate a deck of cards throughout the game in the dice pool building games on dice building games what you're doing is using the dice results to buy other dice putting those dice into your pool of dice so that that grows and then on each turn you're rolling different dice of better dice and dice with different results on the surface of them so that so that you can generate those extras ult's you can build an engine where I purchase things that are going to improve my future turns to dice games by Tom layman these games are they have some complexity to them but they tend to rely around these sort of dice with custom sides on them as special abilities and dice of different colors so if we look at cube to begin with which is the simpler of the pair in cube look at all the dice that we have at absolute ton of different colored dice and each dice will have different surfaces on different results on the different surfaces so if we move over to have a look at the cards that come in the box they show you that on a blue dice for example will have all these different results and these are different special abilities that you can get these are the sort of yellow dice in there and then these cards are what we're aiming for in order to score points so we're using dice to buy more dice building up our pool and then trying to achieve certain results in order to score points this is a similar system to what's used in roll for the galaxy so roll for the galaxy is the dice game version of race for the galaxy a very popular card game now the the number of dice in this is this is my pool I haven't even got them in a special container because there's absolutely loads of them I couldn't even begin to get into the complexity of roll for the galaxy but it is a fantastic game it's a heavy weight but that's very quick playing heavy weight in terms of the complexity of play but short to play and once you get to the hang of it it just runs so smoothly and and and and and the experience is fantastic but it is a bit of a tricky one to learn it's well worth the effort the final group of games that I wanted to discuss with you are games that use dice in an irregular way maybe the dice might be in a regular shape or they might be used in a way that wouldn't be the standard use of a dice throwing it or rolling it as we've seen in these other genres so let's have a look at some games that use dice in an irregular way baby boom is one of the little hidden gems in my collection I don't see anybody talking about it I got it given to me for free at Essen convention a couple of years ago and it's a fantastic little game that uses dice as sort of countdown markers as the bombs that are going to go off so the start of the game all the dice show fives and then each each dice color belongs to a certain place this is a four player game if this yellow player chose to take their turn they could move one of these dice but when they do say they must turn it down one notch and so as dice move around the board they're going to reduce like this and so on and then eventually we're going to have a situation where one of the dice is going to get down to one and then eventually to zero and an explosion happens now this will take out all the dice in the same row and the same column so when this dice explodes it kills these two dice and then this will continue so say this one exploded it would destroy these dice and these dice and so the board gradually empties it's a quick game very very strategic in a sort of chess like sort of manner like an abstract game but but but absolutely brilliant day growth of Earth in its English version is called strike I don't know how easy that is to come by but it has this fantastic little insert inside it and this is not a game of skill this is a game entirely of luck as very little skill well in fact there's no skill in there at all the game starts with three dice in the center like this and then on a player's turn they will chuck a dice in now none of these dice match so the player can continue throwing them in this one is across so it is removed from the game that was thrown him right now he has two sixes so he removes those two sixes and that is the end of his turn the next player then goes and does similar sort of thing this one is taken out and the player takes out the two twos and so the game goes on with players trying to get rid of their own dial when they get thrown in like this another one goes in right in this situation the X is removed and the two sixes match - they're both removed the next player now must throw all of their dice into the pit at the same time so there we go the threes come back to the player and these three remain in there and so dice keep coming back to the players keep going in but it's it's it's just it's kind of hypnotic this game is it's ridiculously more fun than it should be you playing with children it's fantastical playing with children as young as four I played it with groups adults and their wailing and laughing and you know it's fantastic I'm particularly enjoyable when somebody does something ridiculous like throw one in and it just completely backs it out and goes off somewhere and that dose is lost that's the only skill in the game is a landed ice in the pit don't bounce it out Potter fuss is a strange little game from one of my favorite publishers Sachsen spielen who always makes quirky odd little German games suitable for family audiences this one's no different it's about brewing beer and serving up beer to your customers and essentially it uses irregular non regular dice these are barrels which have numbers printed on the opposite sides often it's also for the beer mats which serve no purpose apartment to give you a surface to land your dice on so what you do on your turn as you put the barrels into this dice cup shake help me lay down here you're trying to achieve a set total of numbers and when you release them the numbers which have faced up are the ones which count so here we have six nine and then you can continue rolling more and see if you can increase that total but if ever you roll and none of them are standing up then you've gone bust and that's essentially the essence of the game it's a fun push your luck style dice game cube quest uses very light plastic dice with stickers on them and in this game we are going to be flicking these guys literally flicking them at your opponent to try and knock their pieces off the board and to land your piece in certain areas of the board so if we look at the back of the box you can see what I mean you place your dice into certain combinations even potentially stacking them and then you're literally flicking them trying to knock their King off the board that's pretty much the whole game apart from you have different abilities on these different these different characters the mat itself the board itself is a sort of mouse mat material so it's nice and soft and these dice are extremely light they're hollow plastic disks with stickers on and the stickers over pre you know that they're already on this you know it's been ages ticking up the dice before you start to play it's simple it's very funny it's quick and it's it's it's just unlike unlike any other game I've ever played really I suppose if you think about disc flicking games like catacombs or crock and all the old abstract game these are the sort of the sort of genre that we're in but this is much sillier and but it's hilarious fun that's it that's my top 10 different ways to use dice in wooden board games the top 10 dice game mechanics so what have we left out well I suppose the most significant one is push your luck and the most the classic example being can't stop okay I've left that out because a lot of these games feature push your luck that it does work as a mechanic in your own right but but I tend to think of that as something that it's incorporated into all dice games the other big genre that's missing is real time dice games where you're rolling rolling rolling against the clock perhaps racing against other players there's that game 10z where I'm rolling to be the first person to achieve a certain result or escape that's a escape from the cursed temple or escape from zombie City I can't remember what they're called I find these games very very stressful just rolling rolling other players doing the same thing a bit panic I don't find those particularly enjoyable the other big game that I didn't mention was king of Tokyo and I'm king of New York his close relation which I take that games but I didn't particularly like those I can't honestly tell you why it's something about the production of them or the theme or the length of the game but I find those games I don't enjoy them very much which is why they weren't mentioned although they're clearly significant entries into the world of modern dice games anyway I hope you found this list interesting I hope you found it informative and I hope you come back to see more of my video blogs all the best you