Dice Forge Review

The hammering at the Dice Forge rings out, an incessant peel of thunder leaving ignorant mortals quaking in their boots. The hammering pauses.

“How do you get these damn faces off?”

“Not like that, you clot! Here…”

“Oh, that was easy wasn’t it?”

Players: 2-4
Time: 40 mins
Ages: 10+
Designer: Régis Bonnessée
Artist: Biboun
Publisher: Asmodee, Asterion Press, Gém Klub Kft., Hobby Japan, Libellud, REBEL.pl

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Dice Forge does to dice what Dominion did to decks of cards: create a themeless euro game out of fiddling with components. But what lovely components they are to fiddle with! Once you’ve mastered the art of removing one of the cleverly designed dice faces without firing them across the room, and found the cunningly hidden instructions for what 6 sides should be stuck on your dice to start the game, you’ll enjoy a tactile process which can bring a smile to your face before you even begin playing.

Let’s not pretend gameplay is the only thing that matters. If that were true, miniatures games and metal coins wouldn’t sell a single overly sexualised lump of plastic. Tactility and visuals are are as important to the experience of board gaming as any other facet of their design and Dice Forge has been produced by what can only be described as master craftsmen. The dice and their transferable faces work perfectly. The player boards have little holes to hold the markers tightly against careless knocks and they come pre-punched! Then there is the art.

What a spectacle! It’s a visual treat that so few board games match. The card art blends into the board so you know which slot (slot!) to place them in. But even this colourful vista comes in second place to what is without doubt Dive Forge’s greatest achievement: its insert.

I expressed my joy of putting things among other things in my Bärenpark review and an insert that must have been designed by a structural engineer gives me a sense of happy fulfilment that might not be entirely healthy. But look at it! Everything has its own dedicated slot. The cards can be sorted by purchase type and basic vs advanced. The dice faces come in their own specially sleeved tray that keeps them all in place and ready for the next game. No need for plastic baggies here. It makes putting the game away the thing I look forward to most. Wait… That came out wrong.

Talking about the game now

At some point you are going to have to stop fawning over its looks and get down to playing the actual game. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. You only have 9/10 turns to roll some dice and buy some stuff. What are you actually doing, you ask? I thought I just told y- oh! You mean thematically! Oh dear. Look, why don’t I just leave you with the magnificent “flavour” text from the rule book itself?

That flavour, apparently, is “dust”. You can almost feel the frustrated indifference of whoever had to write that. It could almost have been a homework assignment. Sometimes looks really are just skin deep but in all fairness, I challenge you to come up with any kind of story that could involve changing the faces of plastic dice. It is not a mechanic that lends itself to thematic games, but it doesn’t have to be. Just… Roll with it.

Actually talking about the game now

So we’re rolling these dice and gaining stuff when we do! That’s what those tracks on your player board are for. Because almost all the faces on your dice will produce some quantity of one of 4… things: golden nuggets, fiery sun shards, crescent moon stones, and common old victory points. But that’s it. The job of your dice is merely to move the relevant marker up your track. Which is a bit of a shame.

Each of those resources have a slightly different job. The golden nuggets are what you use to buy new dice faces, and if I’d known that earlier I might have treated KFC with a good deal more reverence. The new faces are better versions of what you’ve got, offering more gold, more stones, more victory points! Some, instead of giving you a big pile of one thing offer you flexibility, a choice between two resources when rolled, an intriguing offer.

Since you can buy multiple faces at once, you need to decide whether you’re going with one expensive tile or multiple cheaper tiles. And once you’ve picked that you need to decide which dice to add them to (you each have two): do you build one die that guarantees you something good? Or spread the risk, resulting in rolls that give you two good things as often as they give you two single nuggets, an occurrence as amusing as it is frustrating. These are interesting decisions! Especially as you have to balance your investment in, and your placement of, four different resources.

Dice Forge, like the best dice games are, is all about managing chance. How to best collect your preferred resource, and how, and when, to spend it for best effect. Though all the planning in the world isn’t going to change the fact that these are dice and yes, you did add that 6 nugget face on three rounds ago and yes, I know it hasn’t turned up once all game, but that’s life for you. Sometimes it just sucks.

Fundamentally, though all of these options amount to the same thing… More stuff. And that’s just not as exciting to me as the options you find in probably it’s closest analogue, Mystic Vale. There is much more depth to the building of cards than to the building of dice, with more scope for doing clever things. How powers interact within a card, and within the several cards you draw from your deck. Two dice cannot offer as much scope for interaction and combo building, nor can the little plastic squares fit rule descriptions like a card can.

Instead, the more interesting powers in Dice Forge are offered up to players on those lovingly illustrated cards I mentioned earlier. This is where those sun and moon shards come in, they are the resources you need to purchase cards. What are cards good for? Mostly they will be your main source of victory points, unless you really focus on gold and vp dice faces, but they often also come with some one shot or ongoing power. Maybe some bonus rolls, potentially giving you the resources you need to take another action (spending sun shards let’s you do a bonus purchase) and afford that awesome tile you wanted. Or they bestow upon you one of the special power tiles which are the exception to my criticism above. There’s a 3x multiplier tile that triples the reward of the other die. There’s a face that lets you earn the reward that someone else has rolled. These are a short step in the right direction.

But the most interesting part of this jaw dropingly pretty card market is not the cards. It’s a little technicality that players find all too easy to forget about. When you buy a card, you move your little wooden pawn to the spot near that card. If anyone else wants to buy from that area, they have to bump you out of that spot, giving you a bonus roll of the dice, a very powerful edge. Therefore, buying cards can be as much about figuring out where your opponents might want to go as it is about finding a card you want. It becomes about trying to twist your plan to avoid bumping your opponents. It adds a great layer of player interaction to a game that would otherwise be missing it.

Dice Forge has clearly had as much care and attention devoted to its gameplay as to its artwork or its insert. It has been finely tuned. It plays extremely quick, leaving you always short of being able to do everything you want. Because everyone rolls their dice on every players turn you always feel like you’re doing something. Everything, even the advanced card powers, are reasonably easy to understand, although you do have to explain them all at the start of the game which is a pain. At every step, Dice Forge seems to be a game that deserves an unconditional recommendation… But.

There’s something that just bothers me about Dice Forge. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it, it just hasn’t wowed me. I think my biggest issue with Dice Forge is that it doesn’t feel like it’s about the dice. Sure, you’re rolling them all the time, but the central mechanic, replacing the dice faces, doesn’t do anything hugely exciting most of the time, it just increases the numbers. Once you’re past the half way stage of the game, adding new faces becomes less rewarding, simply because with the chances of rolling a particular side being what they are, that face might not come up by game end. The second half of the game becomes all about the cards you buy, and the cards aren’t that exciting either. Most are of the one-shot, fire and forget, variety and many just give you the chance to roll your dice some more. I often feel I’m just buying whatever I can afford rather than being excited about the possibilities their powers represent.

But Dice Forge is aiming for accessibility first and in that I think it mostly succeeds. It is an  easy game to get out and get playing. Most people I’ve played it with have really enjoyed it! I was just looking for something with a little more depth, something that made me feel a bit cleverer than it did. I’ll happily play it again, but I won’t rush to.

Rating: Dice Enough

 

My copy of Dice Forge was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can pick it up from your local game store for £34.99 RRP.