Dice Town – A Detailed Review of a Simple Game

Disclaimer:  I am going to probably do a review of a game (board or console) every once in a while.  In my own game shopping, I find it rare that I find a review from someone I relate to at all.  Not that I’m saying I have a Vulcan mind meld with everyone in the world, but I figure I have a pretty interesting take on gaming.  And between the fiance and I, we have some pretty interesting opinions, if I say so myself.

So with that said…Dice Town – A review

My fiance brought home a game he has been lusting after for quite a few months – Dice Town.  Now, I had heard a ton about this game from him – so much that I actually didn’t read much online.  He was so excited about getting this game and he had been searching for it for so long that I figured like it or not – it was going to enter the house.

Setup

So first things first, the game set up is incredibly easy.  The board has  outlines for where everything goes, which is great.  The money, cards (General Store and Property Cards), and gold nuggets all have a home on the long board.  This made setup about a 2 minute job, only that long because we had to open the packages (are we the only gamers who treat this as a special moment? lol).  Outside of placing the cards on the board, each player gets a brown cup (the game is for 2-5 players), 5 dice, and 8 dollars.  The sheriff card goes in the holder (our holder did not card the card upright, so we just kept it on the table in front of us).  Three property cards go face up on the board, one in each outlined spot and you are ready to play.

Game Play

Now, let me say that neither my fiance or I play poker.  So you don’t have to know how to play to understand how to deal with the dice.  The 6-sided die has a slightly different setup than your normal dice.  The six sides are the ace (club on our die..although the directions said this was a spade), king, queen, jack, 9, and 10.  Each side corresponds to a bonus area on the board. The goal of the game is to build the “best hand” using your 5 dice.  You shake all 5 dice in your cup and turn it upside down, covering your dice from view to the rest of the table.  You then select the dice you want to keep.  Any dice over the first costs $1 unless you happen to have a general store card that changes that.  You can also keep no die for the cost of $1.  Building your hand takes some thought – as you not only want the best hand to earn property cards, but you also want to build the hand that gets you the most loot overall.  The player with the most of each side of the die earns bonuses after all 5 dice are set:

Most 9s: 1 gold nugget per 9 rolled.

Most 10s: All the money from the bank.  The money paid for keeping dice ends up piling on the bank after every turn, so this can be a big pot.  Also, the money in the game never increases, so you can really end up needing to roll 10s to earn money.

Most Js: Trip to the general store.  The general store is full of goodies to help you like the ability to turn the die to the side of your choice, free keeps (of more than 1 die), victory points, ect.  This is a great place to build up your arsenal for later rounds.  Draw the number of cards equal to the Js in  your dice roll and pick the one that suits you best.

Most Qs: You have the favor of the girls at the saloon who help you steal from the other gunslingers playing.  Pick a player and select the number of cards (general store and property cards) equal to the number of Qs you roll.  Pick one and give the others back.

Most Ks: You become the sheriff.  The sheriff is huge.  The player who is the sheriff determines who wins any ties (and there will be ties).  You can bribe the sheriff with money and cards to get your way, but ultimately, they decide.  Additionally, the sheriff card is worth 5 victory points at the end of the game.

Best Hand: Selects the bottom most property card.  For every Ace in your hand, you get an additional card up to 3 cards total.  Property cards have victory points, which is there big value in the game.

Doc Badluck:  This is where the player who earned nothing during the trip to Dice Town gets something, maybe.  They choose one of the following:

- Barbed wire – the player has two property claims that cannot be stolen which he has wrapped with barbed wire.
- First card on the general store pile
- All players give that player $2
- One gold nugget from each player.

The sheriff decides the order the players visit Doc Badluck  and each item is in limited stock – only one player can get the item that turn.  So as you can see, the sheriff can really influence what happens during the game.

Each round consists of rolling your dice to create a 5 die “hand”, a trip to Dice Town to figure out who gets what bonus, then repeat.  The game ends when there are no more property cards or no more gold nuggets.

Winner!

At the end of the game, you count up your victory points and the most points win.  Victory points are assigned as follows:

- 1 VP for every $2

- 1 VP for each gold nugget

- 5 VP for being the sheriff at the end of the game

- VPs as listed on property and general store cards.

Review

This game is FUN.  I got my behind handed to me by my fiance and yet I still had a lot of fun losing and learning to play. But let’s be honest – any game that you can unwrap and have learned how to play in less than 10 minutes is a winner.  We have bought a lot of games lately that are very complicated with rules and how to play.  This game took us no time to set up, read the rules and play.  That is a huge WIN.

For me, it took a little bit of time to actually learn how to maximize my trip to Dice Town, but that’s part of the game I guess.  I didn’t understand that getting the best hand isn’t always the best idea…sometimes a low hand full of Queens and 10s does you much better than a perfect hand of all Aces. It’s about learning to play the game, quite literally, of building the best hand for you.

We played with only 2 players, so Doc Badluck was actually never visited, so not much to comment on that aspect of the game yet (I’m getting some gamer girlfriends to play the game on Sunday with me).  We both felt that the game would be more fun with more than 2 people though, only because some of the elements are never used or not as valuable with 2 players.  For example, because there was nobody to pick on with stealing cards except each other and the sheriff became much less of a role player.  We rarely had ties.  The fiance quickly realized he could screw me by selecting 2 or 3 dice per roll, leaving me with the final roll that I had to keep (when the other player has no dice left to roll because they bought multiple dice at a time, you get one roll and are stuck with it), but I wonder if he would have taken the same strategy if there were 4 or 5 of us.  Building a good hand and getting what you wanted from Dice Town is much different when there are only 2 people – we each got 1-2 items minimum per trip.  But I think the difference in strategy will still make the game a fun one.

This game will definitely be one that we play again, I can easily see it becoming my favorite non-super detailed board game and I know I will be introducing all my gamer friends to it in the next few weeks and I’m glad the boy gave into his gamelust and ordered it for us!

What say you?  Have you played Dice Town?  What did you think of it?  Do you have any other games that you love to play that you could recommend to the Fiance and I?