Dice Throne is one of those rare animals, a Kickstarter game that not only made it to retail, but made it to retail in a way that is very accessible to new players who might want to try it out without spending $100+ on it. By their nature, games produced using the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform tend to be bloated, expensive affairs -- the producers of these games know that they have a captive and obsessive audience, and they want to try to sell that audience as much stuff as possible in one shot. Retail buyers, on the other hand, will often buy on a whim, but aren't as likely to pony up for a huge, deluxe game, and the makers of Dice Throne have solved this problem by splitting up the full boxed game into four smaller boxes. Each one works perfectly well as a stand-alone game, but buy all four and you have everything that comes with the Kickstarter version (other than a handful of promotional cards).
The game itself is a delight. It's a fairly straightforward combination of Yahtzee (without the math) and Magic: the Gathering (without the deck construction and collectability). Each player chooses a character to play as, which comes with a set of 5 dice, a deck of 30 cards, a playmat describing all the character's abilities, and assorted tokens used during the game.
I want to pause for a moment here to talk about the staggeringly high production values on display with this game. Whether you have one of the retail packs of two characters, or the eight-character "battle chests" that come direct from the publisher, each character comes packaged in its own separate plastic box that includes all the components for that character, plus spares of some of the tokens and even extra space in the box in case you want to sleeve the cards. The components are of extremely high quality, with gorgeous artwork and durable, well-printed cardboard components.
The core gameplay involves rolling dice in an effort to get specific combinations of numbers or symbols with which to attack your opponent's character. Your playmat describes all the different attacks you can make, based on how your dice come up. You get two re-rolls each turn, but you can also play cards from your hand to modify your dice rolls, make your attacks stronger, or interfere with what your opponent is doing. Additionally, each character has an assortment of tokens that they can play, either on themselves or their opponent, which grant various gameplay effects. It's just the right combination of the luck of the dice and the ability to modify that luck with your cards and tokens.
Any one of the two-character sets is a good dueling game by itself, but the choice of characters is a lot of what gives the game its variety. The first series consists mainly of basic fantasy archetypes: barbarian, elf, paladin, monk, ninja, and so on, but the second series adds some more interesting and esoteric characters like a gunslinger, pirate, and tactician. A recent Marvel Comics themed set adds well known characters like Thor and Black Panther, and last year they even put out a Santa vs. Krampus two-player set for Christmas. Can the barbarian beat the ninja? Is Doctor Strange a better sorcerer than the Pyromancer? Who would really win in a fair fight between Thor and Loki? These are the questions that can only be answered with Dice Throne.
Rating: 4 (out of 5) Quick, engaging gameplay plus top-notch production value combine to make this one of the best dueling games (or versions of Yahtzee) out there.
- Dice Throne official website
- Dice Throne on BoardGameGeek