White Rabbit Dice Solitaire- um, you can play it with spare dice?

White Rabbit Dice Solitaire is so simple that the rules fit on one side of a playing card. You need twelve dice: five red, five blue, one white and one green. Actually, all that matters is having four different colors.

Since it’s a free game with minimal rules, I’m not going to bother to go over the rules in details. You have a row of six dice and a hand of five dice and you have six rounds to make trades to get all the dice in the row the same pip. (The green die is the timer)

White Rabbit is amusing puzzle. I’ve found that I can usually get most of the row where I want it and then spend the last couple rounds trying to roll one die to the number I need.

That said, I would be more interested in White Rabbit twenty years ago. Even if I didn’t have mobile devices with neigh infinite solitaire games and puzzles, we now live in a world with a plethora of tiny micro and nano games. White Rabbit just doesn’t offer enough to be real competition, just novelty.

I really could have used this game a few decades ago for waiting for that one member of our D&D crew to show ups (Yes, I’m talking about you! You know who you are! ) Although when we discovered Button Men, it would have fired White Rabbit. 

It’s a cute little free game that uses stuff we both know you have lying around. But it arrived a generation too late :)

Starting off the year with Dungeon Roll

 I honestly view it as kind of insane on my part but I like to have the first book I read or the first game I play in a new year to be good. It doesn’t have to be the best of the year but I try to avoid garbage.

When I realized I was actively avoiding trying out prototypes and such so they wouldn’t be the first game I learned in 2022, I decided I’d better hurry up and get a game I thought would be good learned. So I learned Dungeon Roll on Board Game Arena. 

Short version: it’s not garbage.

Dungeon Roll is a dungeon crawl built around dice. Which tells you absolutely nothing. There are probably, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, hundreds of games that fit that description. Heck, I could describe Dungeons and Dragons like that.

The core mechanic of Dungeon Roll is that you are managing a pool of white dice while the dungeon is an increasing number of black dice that give you monsters to fight and treasure to loot.

And here is the clever bit: you get a hero card that gives you a couple special powers. More than that, it can get leveled up for better powers. In all honesty, that’s the best part of the game for me. The heroes give you your variety and more interesting decisions.

At first, I thought the game was mindless dice chucking and it was all luck. However, there are some ways you can manage your luck and your dice pool. I do think bad die rolls can easily override your decisions but I’ve been having enough fun that I don’t care. 

It’s really the bells and whistles that will keep me playing Dungeon Roll. The core mechanic isn’t that interesting for me but I want to try out all the hero cards and see what tricks I can pull. The parts are bigger than the sum :P

Two games that I kept thinking about while learning Dungeon Roll were Balloon Pop and Deep Space D6. I learned both of them the month before so they were fresh on my mind.

A big reason why Balloon Pop comes to my mind is I also just learned it via Board Game Arena. It’s a push your luck game with the twist that every time you reroll, you add a new dice. Which, if I am doing my figuring right, actually decreases the odds of getting what you want. I’ve read about some people who felt Dungeon Roll was too light but it’s a boulder compared to Balloon Pop. Balloon Pop is what you pull out when folks want to play LCR.

Deep Space D6 is another narrative genre game, only this one is science fiction. I think it is more balanced and more immersive than Dungeon Roll. Watching after the health of your space ship give Deep Space D6 a strong focus. The dice change but the ship is constant. Hero cards are a source of special powers in Dungeon Roll but the ship is your character in Dungeon Roll. Of course, Deep Space D6 is solitaire only.

Dungeon Roll isn’t going to be the best game I learn this year. It is pretty light and it has some real flaws. But I am going to keep playing it and having fun with it. So a good start to the year.

Seven Steps or dice in purgatory

Earlier in May, I tried out Nine Circles, a Roll and Write about the first part of the Divine Comedy, the Inferno. (You know, the only part anyone ever reads) I enjoyed it enough that I knew I had to try its sequel; Seven Steps, which is about Purgatory.

I’m not going to lie. I had to look up what happened in that part of the poem. Purgatory is a seven-tiered mountain with each tier being one of the seven deadly sins that you have to repent for.

Seven Steps, from the sixth R&W design contest, is a solitaire Roll and Write where you have to overcome seven dice challenges.  It’s what I file under Yahtzee descendants. It’s not super-thematic but it does have nice woodcut-style artwork. And when it comes to these simple games, a little bit of theme goes a long way,

There are some nice touches that help Seven Steps from automatically blurting with the vast number of simple dice games out there. For one thing, rather than a static goal for each challenge, a challenge die is rolled which adjusts the goal. You also have a limited amount of dice manipulation, which isn’t unusual but is helpful.

But the real nice touch of the design is the dice pool management. You start with seven dice  (although you can get two more by forcing rerolls at the start of the game) The dice that you use to complete a challenge? They go out of the pool into the scoring area. You can pull them back to pay for rerolls but those dice and dice that you rolled but didn’t use end up in ‘the penalty box’ and don’t back to your pool for a turn.

While Nine Circles was a decent, very playable game, Seven Steps is a definite improvement. In Nine Circles, dice management consisted of trying not to lose dice. In Seven Steps, losing dice is how you score points but you lose if you have nothing to roll. It’s a more more interesting dynamic.

Seven Steps is still a light little dice game but now I’m really curious to see what the (hopefully) inevitable Paradise game will be like.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2553688

 

I _finally_ try Qwixx

A few years ago, I made a homemade copy of Qwixx. Then I found an unopened thrift copy and picked that up. So, of course, I don’t actually get around to playing it until I buy the app :P

In a sentence, Qwixx felt to me like Lost Cities the Dice Game. And I know there is actually more than one version of that game officially and unoffically out there. I’ve played some of them. Still, Qwixx captured that idea very well for me, perhaps better than those other games.

Over the last couple years, I’ve started really exploring Roll and Writes. I’ve learned that that can have it’s a form that can have depth and complexity and really embrace theme. A Roll and Write can tell a story and have the oomph of a game with lots of pieces. 

Qwixx so does not fit into that box. This is a simple game with no theme that’s all about the numbers. It’s all about the bell-shaped curve of two six-sided dice.

But that is not me bashing it. Quite the opposite, this is a very good game. It is a very simple game but simple doesn’t mean that the game is either bad or was easy to design. In this case, simple means they pared the decisions down to the absolute basic concept. And it works.

Qwixx is just about the opposite of everything I’ve been exploring in Roll and Writes. It has no theme. It has no dice manipulation. And it’s actually been published :P (Thanks to Kickstarter, a surprisingly high number of designs don’t remain unpublished) You just cross off numbers.

And I like it!

A literal second look at King of Tokyo

The first time I played King of Tokyo was a two-player game in January, 2013. The second time was a five-player game in June, 2019. Yeah, those were two very different experiences. And, to no one’s surprise, the five-player game was the much better experience.

Calling King of Tokyo Yahtzee with giant monsters is a fair description but it is more than Yahtzee with some giant monster pictures added. Very importantly, you get to beat each other up!

This was the first time I got to try the Power Up expansion, which I liked. I liked the original power cards (random but goofy fun) and the expansion gives you another, even more thematic way to get them.

Years ago, a friend said King of Tokyo was what Monsters Menace America should have been. When I pointed out they were not even remotely alike apart from being about giant monsters, he said he really meant that he’d rather play King of Tokyo. Which I can understand. I do like Monsters Menace America but King of a Tokyo is a lot more accessible and I can see it being a lot easier to get on the table.

And not only have I not played King of New York, I’m not sure if I want to. Part of the appeal of King of Tokyo is how simple it really is. I’m not sure if making it more complex is a selling point. If I want a more complex dice game, I have Alea Iacta Est or Kingsburg or To Court the King or others. Just like I don’t want to try any of the later versions of Tsuro. The simplicity is part of the selling point.

King of Tokyo remains a game that I don’t mind playing but wouldn’t particularly seek out and would only buy if our son ended up really liking it. It’s two main selling points for me are simplicity and going all in its goofy theme. 

Reiner Knizia's Decathlon still has legs

GenCan't has let me revisit Reiner Knizia's Decathlon. It's actually been an interesting experience since I have played a lot of both light dice games and print-and-plays since I last played the Decathlon.

The Decathlon is a well known Print and Play. Part of that is definitely because it's by a well known designer. Part of it is because it's easy to make. Print out a page and grab some dice. But part of it is because the Decathlon is a decent, although not brilliant, game. 

As the name flat out states, you play out the ten events of the Olympic Decathlon. The twist is that each game is it's own distinct dice mini-game. And both the strengths and weaknesses of the game are tied to that.

On the one hand, most light dice games are repetitive. You're doing thats same thing over and over again. In the Decathlon, the events are just different enough that you have to adjust your thinking for each event. That gives the game a distinct feel, even after all these years.

And you have a limited number of rerolls in each game. That both keeps the game moving along and keeps the tension high. There is weight to every roll you make.you have to decide how far you want to push your luck.

On the other hand, lets be honest. None of the mini games are strong enough to stand on their own. No one is going to sit down and say let's play a few rounds of the 400 meter dash. The overall game is and has to be greater than the sum of its parts.

(Moving on to neutral elements)

The Decathlon has the odd quality of being pretty dry and pretty thematic at the same time. If the theme was fixing ten parts of a space ship or fighting ten battles of Alexander the Great or operating ten different rail lines, it wouldn't work nearly as well. The Olympic Decathlon gives it a unifying theme that makes each mini-game flow together. But it's still pretty dry.

The Decathlon is also a bit longer than most light dice games. I'd pull out Cinq-O or Zombie Dice if we wanted a quick, low thought activity. The Decathlon is just long enough and (maybe) just complicated enough that it's more of a planned game rather than a spontaneous one.

All in all, Reiner Knizia's Decathlon still holds up. I'll admit some of its value comes from the fact that the files are free and it costs almost nothing in time and materials to make. But that alone doesn't make a game worth playing. It also has tension and interesting decisions to make. It's not perfect and I wouldn't want to play it every week. But it is a game I'd play again.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6955/reiner-knizias-decathlon

Struggling to find something nice to say about Catan Dice

As near as I can tell, I actually haven't written about the Catan Dice Game, other than taking playing it solitaire back when I had an android phone. Which is odd, because I was pretty sure that I had. Well, if I did, it would have been close to ten years ago.

Okay, short version. The Catan Dice Game is really, when you get down to it, Yahtzee that uses a Catan map for a score sheet. You build roads and villages and cities and knights, albeit in a specific order. The five resources are on the rather nice dice, plus gold. Two gold make a wild and the knights each serve as one-time resources.

And I ultimately found the game dull, even disappointing. I actually enjoy Yahtzee and games like Take It Easy that are genuinely multi-player solitaire. But, for me, the heart and selling point Catan franchise is the heavy player interaction. 

It also doesn't help that, since then, I have played dice games like the Zooloretto dice game and the Bohnanza dice game that used mechanics from their parent games and felt like I was playing games from their franchises. The Catan Dice Game just doesn't measure up to that comparison.

I do have two caveats.

First of all, I play it a lot back when I had an Android phone. It was fun as a way of fidgeting. 

Second of all, I understand Klaus Teuber actually originally designed a more complicated and interactive game and his publishers insisted on the simpler version. (Since the dice game has sold very well, I can't even say they were wrong.) Since the initial release, which is when I got my copy, variance have been released and some are even now included in the game.

So if you want to accuse me of not giving the game a fair shake, that's reasonable. It has clearly come a ways since that first edition.

I was tempted to buy a copy again when I saw it on clearance the other day. The original base game was pretty meh for me but I do like the dice and maybe some of the variants would make them sing.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/27710/catan-dice-game

Sadly, Las Vegas doesn't excite me

Okay. I have to admit that I don't find Rudiger Dorn's Las Vegas very interesting. 

I've put off writing about it because it's the darling of so many gamers and was a Spiel de Jahres finalist and I've given it much plays to try and find the magic. 

Which really seems kind of odd. I like dice games. I like dice placement games in particular. I like casual games and family weight games. Las Vegas ticks all of those boxes. And I think it is very well designed.

There are six casino tiles, one for every pip on the die. Players have color-coded dice pools. Money is dealt out to each casino each round. On your turn, you roll your pool and assign all the dice of one pip to the matching casino. When everyone is out of dice, you cash out the casinos with the money going to whoever has the most dice on each casino. If there's more one bill, someone gets to be second place. But if there on ties, those dice don't count.

Honestly, I don't think you could make a simpler dice placement game. And the theme is accessible to the wider audience. 

And Las Vegas has actual choices. The different casinos are worth different points, er, money. Some might reward second or even third place. And since you have to go all in with every die of a pip, you can drain your dice pool quickly. And the rule about ties negating themselves, that adds a real twist. 

Plus, there is a variant where everyone gets some neutral dice in their pool. It adds another layer of decisions and turns ties into a serious weapon.

At the end of the day, Las Vegas is a very simple game that is very balanced with real choices and heavy interaction. I understand why people like it. I understand why there is now a mass market version coming out.

And it just doesn't interest me. And I'm a guy who enjoys abstracts and has played plenty of dice game with no theme. 

It may be because I've exclusively played it on Yucata. The game may get a lot more tension face-to-face.

Dice games in my pocket

It is hardly a secret that I am a big fan of games that you can fit in your pocket. When I was first getting into gaming and hadn't gotten serious about having a game closet, those were the first kind of games that were in my collection. A big part of my reentry into playing board games were games at coffee shops or restaurants or waiting for everyone to show up for the D&D game.

(For a very brief time, a lot of my gaming was done with Cheapass's Hip Pocket line at a coffee shop across from the Music Box in Chicago that I'm pretty sure is gone. I don't think it was for more than a month but it was so early in my gaming experience that it stands out)

While there is now a ridiculous vast wealth of small games, it wasn't like there was shortage back when I got started. Heck, there would have been plenty of options if I'd gotten started twenty years before I did.

And simple dice games are one of the fundamental forms of travel games. 

Seriously, they are their own beast. No one is going to call Cthulhu Dice  micro game, even though it consists of one die and some beads. (On the other hand, since it's basically a LCR variant, I'm not sure I personally consider it a _game_)

Of course, dice have their own profoundly ancient history and cultural significance. They have their own space in the world of gaming, one that has a much wider audience than the kind of games I normally play. I know there are events called Bunko parties and I've passed my share of back alley craps games when I lived in Chicago. I once worked with a guy, decidedly not into games, who still carried six dice around in a cigar case so he could play Ten Thousand at bars.

If you are carting around games in your coat pocket to play anywhere with anyone, games that will appeal to a wide audience are a good thing. And dice games can often fill that bill nicely.

In my experience, particularly with an older audience, more abstract games are often easier sells. Zombie Dice surprised me by being a solid push your luck game with some interesting play with probability. However, if you can sell someone on Zombie Dice, they might be up for a more complicated, thematic game.

For many years, my most reliable simple dice game has been Cinq-O,  a Yahtzee variant that offers a decent number of choices and control. It used to be super easy to find but it's been out of print long enough to be rare. Which is a shame and I hope it gets reprinted. Good for adults and great for parents. Future generations of parents could use this game and I'm glad I have it for my kid.

But, before I found Cinq-O, my dice game in my pocket of choice was Cosmic Wimpout. In fact, this blog entry was originally just going to be about Cosmic Wimpout before I got sidetracked out the window.

Cosmic Wimpout, while obviously developed from Ten Thousand, has its own quirky identity and place in culture. I mean, it's a favorite of Grateful Dead fans. That gives it a crazy street cred that no money can buy. It also takes away a lot of a player's control, which is usually a total deal breaker for me, but somehow it works with Cosmic Wimpout.

Over the last few years, I have looked and played a lot of micro games, mostly card games but board games as well. Print and play hasn't hurt that exploration. However, I know it's important not to stop looking at the fundamental bedrock of dice.

I stare bemused at Can't Stop Express

When I saw an ad for a Kickstarter for a game called Can't Stop Express, I had to look into it. Can't Stop has been a constant part of my gaming experiences since the start. One click later and I saw at a glance that it was Solitaire Dice from Gamut of Games with a Can't Stop brand slapped on it.

My first thought was 'Really?' My second thought was 'Well, it is a dice game by Sid Sackson.' Thought number three 'And it is a pretty decent game.' The last thought in that glance was 'but do I really need a published copy?'

The game has been kicking around since 1969 and has been published in a few different forms, like Choice and Extra. I first came across the game on BSW where you could open it in a separate window as a solitaire game that I played god knows how many times when people were slow to take a turn.

As far as playing in face to face,  some of my friends and I would sometimes play Solitaire Dice waiting for D&D games to start with the dice that were naturally lying around and scrap paper.

So, while it's been years since I last played, I have played Solitaire Dice a lot.

The game consists of five dice and what's basically a checklist for each player. Basically, you are tracking combinations of two six-sided dice. You also keep track of the fifth die you don't use each roll. And, the more unlikely the combination, the better the points. So, two and twelve are worth a lot more than seven.

The complications come in that you have to get five checks in a number before it's worth positive points (Kind of reminds me of Lost City) and the fifth dice serves as a timer. Eight checks after a number and that player's game ends.

Solitaire Dice is one of those games that is annoying to explain but once someone plays even a couple turns, it all clicks. 

At first, branding it with Can't Stop seemed very strange to me. But, it is a dice game that involves pairing dice that's designed by Sid Sackson. And it a push-your-luck game, albeit in more of luck management style. So, it's a fair call. 

I'm a bit torn about Can't Stop Express as a product. On the one hand, it's a game that I used to play a lot and I think is a really good use the bell curve of two dice. Not as good as Can't Stop but still solid. On the other hand, I've made my own scoresheets plenty of times and that was before I got into print-and-play. I don't feel the need to get what amounts to a pad of scoresheets.  

However, this is probably the biggest exposure Solitaire Dice has ever had in over forty years. With the successes of games like Qwix and Rolling Japan/America, I think Can't Stop Express can grab some market share. 

When boards and pawns get replaced by dice and cards

ReAs I have grown older, card and dice adaptations of board games have become more of a focus for me. Part of this is because they've become more and more common. They are also an interesting exploration of game mechanics. How do you change and distill a game to adapt it? And, plus, they're handy when you have less gaming time and storage space :D

There are three questions I usually ask myself when I look at a card or dice adaptation.

1. Is it any good as a game?

Seriously, that's the basic question you have to ask about any game. There's plenty of criteria to apply. Is the game fun to play? Does it offer an interesting experience? Does it offer interesting decisions?

I can't tell you what makes a game good. We wouldn't have such a variety of games out there if there was a single answer. But a game has to be good for me and the folks I play with to get played more than once.

2. Does it take up less space or take less time to play?

If the card or dice version takes up less storage space, that's a plus for me. If it has a smaller footprint on the table or takes less time to set up or breakdown, that's good too. And these days, when life has me busy in a lot of other ways, a shorter playing time is also a big selling point.

Of course, as our son gets older, some of those things might not be quite so big a deal. On the other hand, having shorter, simpler versions of games to reach him will become handy.

3. Does it capture the feeling of its parent game?

Truth to tell, this isn't a deal breaker. If we enjoy playing the game and the shared name is just branding slapped over the top, I don't care. Still, it is nice when it happens. And, in some rare cases, makes me feel okay about having the card or dice version and not the board version.

A good example of a game that has stayed in my collection is Euphrates and Tigris: Clash of Kings. It is not as good a game as it's boardgame parent, Tigris and Euphrates. It also takes about as much space on the table. However, it is still a good game and it takes up a fraction of the storage space. For as often as I have ever played Tigris and Euphrates, the card version is an acceptable alternative in my collection.

Back in 2002, Hasbro put out card versions of several classic games.

These versions of Battleship and The Game of Life are still in my collection and I'd much rather play them than the originals.

In most cases, there is a tradeoff when a game or at least the theme is taken into a new medium. Sometimes, you lose more than you gain. However, at least for me, it's at least worth looking into.

Demonic hares, climbing chefs, oh my!

For my old gaming group, Devil Bunny Needs a Ham was the mascot for Cheapass Games. 

Yeah, that position is actually filled by the Doctor Lucky series with the Friedays Zombies in close competition. But, for us, nothing captured the minimalism and the absurdity of James Earnst's designs like Devil Bunny Needs a Ham.

The medically, the game is about doing teams of sous chefs who are trying to climb to the top of a sky scraper on the outside. You know, rather than take an elevator. Why? I guess regular parkour was too easy. However, Devil Bunny is trying to knock you off the sky scraper because he thinks that will get him a ham. Why? Because he's _INSANE_

Devil Bunny Needs a Ham goes a long way towards justifying the theory that Escape of Elba, a game by James Earnst about escaping from an insane asylum, is autobiographical.

In the original game, you got a paper envelope that had a two-piece board forming the skyscraper in the rules. In the printing play version that is available now, you get the exact same thing. You just need to provide some pawns, some dice and an extra special pawn to serve as Devil Bunny. 

At its heart, Devil Bunny Needs a Ham is really just a roll-and-move game (surprise!) It uses the standard methods of making roll-and-move interesting: each player gets multiple pawns to move and you get choices about what direction to move them. You see, the board is really a grid with some blocked off spaces. Pawns can move horizontally and diagonally but not vertically, you know, the way you really want to move. The number of pawns that you get, along with how many dice you to get roll, depends on the number of players.

Of course, the game wouldn't be complete without Devil Bunny. When a six is rolled, Devil Bunny hops on the highest pawn and knocks them down. If you are too high up, you don't get to survive the fall. Other pawns can catch you but, if they belong to another player, they have the option of letting you keep on falling.

The game ends when the roof of the skyscraper is filled up. Scoring is based on the order that the pawns arrive there. Whoever has the highest score wins and presumably actually gets to use the elevator to get back down.

By no means is Devil Bunny Needs a Ham a brilliant game. However, it's a game that is super easy to teach (seeing as how the core concepts are ones just about everyone is familiar with) At the same time, it offers some interesting choices as you jockey your climbers up the sky scraper, trying to block and make sure you can catch your highest climber if Devil Bunny comes out to play.

For years, I kept a copy of Devil Bunny Needs a Ham in my Dungeons and Dragons folder, because three pages took up new room and we could pull out and play if we needed a quick board game.

Devil Bunny Needs a Ham's biggest claim to fame is the absurd theme. It's not like there aren't other genuinely interesting roll-and-move games out there. Backgammon alone has fit that bill for centuries. However, it is super easy to get while still being a decent game. It will make folks laugh when you pull it out and I do like the wide open board, just waiting for players to turn it into a tight maze.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/185/devil-bunny-needs-ham

http://www.cheapass.com/freegames/dbnah

How Button Men demonstrates a good rule of thumb for quick games

Particularly when it comes to micro games, I have a simple formula that I tend to judge them by. Effectively, how many meaningful decisions do I get to make per minute?

This is really something that applies more to micro games then larger games. After all, a micro game is not going to be more complicated or deeper than a larger game. Well, at least it really shouldn't be! If that's the case, you're probably picking the wrong larger game to compare it to!

Really, with larger games, the time factor isn't as stringent. I'd go with how many interesting decisions I get to make during a turn. Even that isn't that good a formula. After all, some games, like Macau or Le Havre, are really about building up to making those big decisions.

 

But it still a decent rule for judging micro games.

There are any number of games that I could use as an example for the rule. Pico 2 or Love Letter are both examples but I'm going to go with Button Men, a quirky little dice game designed by James Ernst.

Button Men is one of those games that is much better in play than it sounds like it has any right to be. Stripping all of the chrome away from the game, which really doesn't serve any purpose other than to give them an excuse to add a picture to the buttons are cards, Button Men is a game about capturing dice.

Short version, each player has a collection of dice that is determined by their button/card/character. You use your dice to capture the other guys dice by either using one die that has a higher number or two or more dice that add up to exactly the number of the die you're capturing. Every die that is used to capture another die is then be rolled, shifting the playing field.

There is always at least one interesting crucial decision to make in a round of Button Men, generally two or three. However, since you can usually knock a three-round game out in five minutes, that's pretty good.

Was I engaged during the game? Do I feel like my decisions were important to whether or not I won or lost? Did I have fun? Did I feel like I played a game? I ask myself those questions for any game but I really feel that if I can say yes to a game that takes five minutes to play, that's a big deal.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17/button-men

http://www.cheapass.com/node/39