Spots is more than just rolling dice

I will be honest, I don’t feel I’ve explored or played Spots enough to really give it a decent commentary. I’m doing it because it lets me compare it to Alfred’s Wyke, a kooky and underrated abstract lol

Spots is a family dice game themed arijnd Dalmatians. You are trying to place dice  on cards that show cartoony Dalmatian dogs whose spots are different dice pips. And if that’s all there was to Spots, it would be instantly forgettable.

But, as you can tell by my foreshadowing, there is more to it than that. Spots is an action selection game. Players pick actions, which can be draw a dog card or roll two dice, then choose to roll one die. Not every action actually involves rolling dice!

Dice you can’t roll go in your yard (buried because we are talking about dogs here) If their value goes over seven, your yard and incomplete dogs get wiped.

First player to finish six dogs wins.

There’s more going on in Spots than I expected. While the direct dice manipulation is limited to bones that let you reroll, the different actions make the game a lot more interesting than I expected and I think a face-to-face play would be fun.

And, as I mentioned, it made me think of Alfred’s Wyke because both have action selection that only resets when you’re down to one action. Other than that, they have absolutely nothing in common lol

Alfred’s Wyke is an abstract that was originally published in Games magazine but got a second chance at life via Super Duper Games. It’s never been published and I bet that the game was designed using upside down Scrabble tiles. It’s a unique design that deserves more life.

I should see if Super Duper Games is still online.

And back to Spots and my actual issue with it.

However, I learned Spots via solitaire mode which has you play against an automata opponent. While not my favorite way to play, a good automata can be a lot of fun. In Spots, it’s roll a die, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for making informed choices. 

Some games just don’t work as solitaires. I know that having a solitaire mode has become a major selling point but sometime, the answer is just no.

Alas, some abstracts won’t convert non-lovers

I have been spending perhaps an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on abstracts and abstracts I that folks who get hives from abstracts will still enjoy. Well, at least in my own arrogant opinion. Nine times out of ten, my reasoning probably breaks down to ‘I like it so you should too!’

However, there are some abstracts that I like that I’m absolutely convinced that only abstract lovers would enjoy. None of ‘Hive is the abstract for abstract haters’. Some games are ‘you don’t like abstracts? Yeah, you won’t like this’.

There doesn’t seem to be a formula to this. If simple and accessible were what it takes, Edward de Bono’s L-Game would be the gift for converting folks to abstracts. Each player gets one piece and there are two neutral pieces. Block your opponent from making a move and you get to win. But the game is so dry with the potential for the endless stalemates, I consider it more of an intellectual exercise in minimalism than a game.

Amazons, on the other hand, is a game that I think is cracking good. (I don’t actually know where that phrase comes from. I just stole the adverb from Bertie Wooster.) You move your queens on a ten by ten board, blocking off squares with every move. The board grows smaller and smaller and if you can’t move, the other guy wins. 

Amazons is a head cracker of a game and a really smart design. But it seems to be only the darling of abstract lovers. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I know but I can’t see myself trying to convert someone to abstract games with Amazons.

(Okay, maybe the fact that it is such a brain burner is a reason)

Then, there is the likes of games like Alfred’s Wyke, which is a weird abstract lover’s weird abstract. You either remove or add tiles in order to control a grid and there are five different types of moves. And you can’t use a move that’s been used in the last two turns.

Honestly, I have never found a game even remotely like it. It’s never been published outside of a magazine article and the website Super Duper Games has probably given it any exposure it’s had. It’s brilliant and almost unheard of and just plain weird. This is a game I’d struggle to get other abstract lovers to like.

A lot of the abstracts I’m interested in are games that I think folks who aren’t into abstracts can still enjoy. I’m an Everyman of abstracts for the most part. But apparently there are some exceptions.