Casino Night

Once again, the so-called "Alea medium-box" series has quietly expanded by two games while I wasn't paying attention. So once again, it was time to expand my game collection. I picked up the two games I didn't yet have, #8 and #9, and have been looking for chances to try them out.

#8, Las Vegas, turned out to be quite easy to try out, because it sets a new bar in the series for "easy to explain, fast to play." Where previous games in the series have featured multi-page, stapled booklets explaining the rules, the rules sheet of Las Vegas is a single 4 page sheet, printed on both sides and folded in half. For a German game, that's unthinkably simple.

As you might expect, the game is hardly a revelation of depth. But it's still rather fun. The center of the play space contains six numbered casinos. Each is loaded with money cards from a shuffled deck of different values; some spaces will have only one card, while others may have two or three. Each player receives eight dice, and on his turn rolls all of them. He must then select one number rolled, and place all dice of that value onto the corresponding casino. This continues around the circle over multiple rolls until all players have placed their dice.

At the end of this round of play, money is awarded by the casinos. The player with the most dice in a casino gets the highest valued single money card; the second most dice gets the second best card (if there is one); and so on. But there is a catch. Any player who has the exact same number of dice in one casino as another player doesn't get anything at all, no matter how many dice they have. Instead, all "tied dice" are removed, which can cause another player to become highest ranked at that casino. After four full rounds of this play, the player with the most money wins.

The strategy isn't deep, but there are some choices to make throughout the game. Should you play many dice with authority to lock up a casino, or try to hold lots of your dice to roll at the end of a round after everyone else has gone out? Should you commit fully to a casino with only one card to award, or try to have a presence in multiple casinos even if you can't win any of them -- shooting for second place or hoping that the leaders tie? Admittedly, there is some randomness here that can easily thwart your strategy, but things don't feel totally at the mercy of the dice either.

The bottom line is, the game is fairly fun, and certainly fun enough to sustain the 20 or 30 minutes it takes to play. It seems like the perfect game to either start off a game night (before all the guests have arrived), or to end a game night (when people are too tired for a demanding game). I'd give Las Vegas a solid B.