Dice Throne

The other day, I played a board game called Dice Throne. The campaign was a simple one. Gather the dice shards from across the map, kill enemies and then kick the ass of a boss character. It’s a pretty fun game, but it is also pretty damn strange.

The first thing that is strange is that there is no board. Instead, we have several scenarios, and we build a map using various cards of various difficulties. Each map has a portal card from which you start, various cards of locations with varying difficulties, and finally a boss tile where you place your collectes dice shards. You build the map out of tiles basically. And as you play and step on tiles, you flip them over and have an encounter with an enemy. Someone you need to kill to continue.

That brings us to the playable characters. Each character comes in its own box, with its own custom dice, deck of cards, health and combat point wheels and a large placemat, a board that lays out what your character can do.  And there are quite a few characters to choose from. When I played, we had two boxes worth of characters to choose from and a box based on Marvel characters, all of whom range wildly in difficulty to play.

Once you have set up your map, you can travel across tiles, revealing them as you do so. Most tiles have an encounter with an enemy of a specific level. This is where the fighting happens. With your five dice, you roll them and do an attack based on what you roll. You also have a hand of cards which can be used in battle to alter a dice roll, draw more cards or upgrade your abilities.

The encounters though can be quite difficult. Players start with little health, and it’s quite possible to roll really well as an enemy and do tons of damage. Defeating an enemy though is always a good thing because they let you roll a D20 for your loot.

The loot isn’t very good, honestly.

As for the difficulty of the encounters, it really depends on luck. The level 1 enemies are okay, but the level 2-4 enemies are toughies. And they can come at you really easily. For some reason, many of the tiles, when flipped, will have you fight a monster one level above the tile you are standing on. So a level 1 tile can give you a level 1 encounter, or it will give you a level 2 counter unless you pay some sort of fee. Most of the tiles I saw were like this.

I didn’t mind that much about the enemy difficulty though. What confuses me more is just how many debuffs and status effects the game has. Every character has 1-2 of their own, and there are like, ten debuffs that all do their own things. When we played, we constantly had to refer back to the instructions which explained each status effect.

Overall though, Dice Throne is a pretty good game. The characters are all really cool and nicely designed, and the game in general looks really good. It plays well too, even if it is really just the luck of the dice. But the status effects are a little too silly…