Dice Throne is a battle royal game for 2 to 6 players. Each player has a character with particular powers determined by the symbols on a set of dice they roll. On your turn, you get three rolls (Yahtzee-style) to hone the best result you can, then use it as an attack on one of the other players. They get one chance to roll to defend against at least some of the damage (and maybe to inflict a modest counterattack). But essentially, it's a war of attrition to be the last player standing.
The designers knew that a true free-for-all wouldn't make for a fun game, and wisely restricted things so you can't just gang up on the leader or pick on someone you don't like on that particular game night. With every attack, you must roll to determine whether it affects the player on your left, your right, or your choice between the two. It's a little tedious, but I think necessary for the game to be even close to fair. (But it might be one reason the Board Game Geek community has judged this game to be best for two players.)
There's also ever-expanding content within this system. New sets of two characters, meant for head-to-head play, are released regularly, with the "season" box sets like the one I played being a collection of several of those characters for a larger play group. This serialized expansion system might be another reason why the Board Game Geek community says this is best for two.
Another reason it might be considered "best for two?" It takes too long with more. There are many ways to handle dice rolling in games, but something about this game feels extra chaotic to me. It's very slow paced, because every character has an array of unique powers that only the player using them really understands. Interactions between players take a long time to explain and resolve. That's not helped by the vague game rules that don't give much guidance on how effects tokens are meant to interact with each other if stacked on the same player.
And yet the game is also very repetitive. Despite that broad array of powers, there are fundamentally only maybe half a dozen things you can do -- and most of those things require special and rare combinations of dice rolls. It only takes you a few rounds to feel like every one of your turns is pretty much the same as every other turn -- it all just boils down to: one of your opponent loses a few of their health points.
Then there's the spotty theme draped over the whole thing. Each character has powers that seem pretty well chosen to give a decent identity to the player -- here's the muscle-bound bruiser, here's the crafty trap-setter, and so forth. But each character also has a deck of cards you use when you play them, and the names of those cards are fourth-wall breaking quips I would have thought suitable only for playtesting. There's a card that leans into the game's randomness called "Vegas Baby," a healing card called "What Stack Effects?," and other similar titles that have no ambition to portray Dice Throne as a world with any meaningful story. Yet it seems to me that most games that care this little about theme are sophisticated, strategic endeavors where the player will be too busy plotting to care what the theme says they're "supposed" to be doing. Dice Throne certainly isn't that.
So, it's long, it's repetitive, the rules are vague, it's chock-full of randomness, and the story of the game is totally unimportant. And it's so very much all of those things that not only did I not like it myself, I struggled to imagine the target audience. Maybe the Betrayal at House on the Hill crowd? (Though the flavor is sorely lacking, comparatively.) Maybe I'm just thinking of that game as a comparison because that's the last game I can think of where I had that little fun playing it.
I give Dice Throne a D -- and that high only because
it can give you the occasional visceral thrill of a potent dice roll.
But plenty of games can give you that, and so much more. I don't see why
you'd play this one.
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