Un-named dice game super preliminary first try

This blog has been dead for a while, I've decided to revive it with my next project (that i'll probably lose interest in halfway through again anyway, ha). The issue with Reliquary is that while it had some interesting decisions and my brain was in the right place for it at the time, it was too complex for my first real attempt at game design. I learned a lot, and it was very stimulating, but in the end it was just boring to play. I know I could have kept at it and ended up with a great game, but it was beyond me at the time.

I've known for a while that my next project will need to be much simpler. I really like abstract games, theme isn't that important to me, so I figured my next one should scrap theme entirely until near the end and just focus on interesting decisions and mechanics.

So I've had this idea knocking around my head for about a week that involves each player having a ton of dice and playing them on a board like tiles would be in other games. The main influence was Taluva, I wanted it to be 3d, and instead of people drawing random tiles and placing them strategically, they roll dice and use the outcome strategically. Ultimately I do not intend to have this game played with D6 spotted dice, I actually just bought 400 blank colored dice for this exact reason (it was a steal!) but for the groundwork I needed regular dice.

I shopped around, but didn't really want to drop 20-30 dollars on a bunch of D6 spotted dice that would only be used for the early testing of this game. Then i bumped into a thread online talking about "Dicetime" dice that are only sold at Dollar Tree. $1 for 10 dice, 5 colors, and two of each color. The dice are crappy and made in taiwan but this made perfect sense for my project. I ended up going to 3 Dollar Tree stores looking for them, two stores had some so i bought them out but that unfortunately still left me with only 7 packs. I was hoping for 10, oh well.

This morning after a protracted sleep in thinking about the mechanics for a while I decided to give it a shot with what I have rattling around in my head so far. The rules are currently:

• Each player has 14 dice of their color.
• Player rolls 2 dice at the beginning of their turn.
• They choose one of the two die and place it on the playing surface with the following conditions

1. A die can only be placed orthogonally next to another die of your color if its value is the same.
2. If you rolled the same value on both die, then you get to place both die on this turn instead of just choosing one.
3. You can place your die on top of an opponents die only if the value of your die matches the value of the die you are covering. You can only do this if the opponents die is orthogonally adjacent to one of your die.

• The game is over when one player has no more dice to roll on their turn.
• The winner is the player with the largest orthogonally connected chain of connected die in their color. Only the top die counts, so covered die are gone for good.

I played with three colors, each having 14 die total. I was surprised at how interesting the decisions were right off the bat, honestly I was expecting it to play mechanically and be completely boring the first time though. I of course played as all three colors, though I did my best to stay in the frame of mind of making the one i'm rolling currently do their best. This was pretty easy since it is a 100% open information game currently.

Red started out strong, and at one point even had a 7 die chain, but green and blue did their best to break into it. The very first die placed was two 5s that red luckily rolled on the first round, and by the end of the game I had a massive stack of 5s where there was heated competition. The first thing that stuck out is my "play both die if you get a double" seemed REALLY powerful. On one hand I really liked this since it can come at the right time to make a big bounce back, but on the other hand it makes the game more random then i'd like at the moment. One interesting result was rolling two of a number you don't have, so you place one adjacent to an opponents die with that value, and using the second die to cover the opponents since you are now adjacent to it.

In the end, Red rolled doubles more then green and blue and I have a sneaking suspicion thats why Red won. However it was a close game, you can see in the images below that Red had a chain of 4 and blue and green both tied for second with chains of three. Red ended up ending the game due to running out of die to roll, and blue and green were both left with at least 4 die leftover, so a big double rolling disparity.

All in all I am very heartened by how this went. I obviously need to do some tweaking to the rolling doubles rule. I want SOMETHING cool to happen when you roll a double, but placing both is simply too powerful. Plus I like the idea of every player getting the same number of turns and die placements and in this case Red had a 4 die on the board advantage over both blue and green.

I also need to come up with a nifty name...hmmm