No dice

I was talking to some friends over in the Slack server for supporters of Gaming Rules! and we touched on the subject of dice. In this specific case it was talk about the game Andromeda’s Edge. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Euro game semi-sequel to the hit Dwellings of Eldervale, but set in space.

It’s an unusual game in the Euro game space as it relies on dice for combat resolution. Most other games of this ilk either have no combat or rely on something different, like Voidfall (you can read my review of this amazing game right here) with its deterministic combat. Deterministic means that you already know the outcome of a scrap before you even make your move.

The conversation got me thinking. I own and enjoy plenty of games with dice in them, but very few use the roll of a dice to essentially decide if I’m going to win or lose something important. Teotihuacan uses dice as workers, with their pips representing their strength. Wayfarers of the South Tigris uses dice for actions, and you roll them, but much of the game is focused on how to mitigate for your dice rolls. The experiences I’ve had with using dice to resolve pivotal confrontations haven’t always gone well.

Andromeda’s Edge, for example. I bought a copy after missing out on Dwellings of Eldervale and getting swept up in the hype for it when it got released to retail. I played it once, and that was enough for me to know that I didn’t enjoy using dice to see what happens in a fight in a modern Euro game. I sold it straight after. It wasn’t an enjoyable experience for me. What about non-Euro games, though? What about games that don’t pretend that insular, isolated strategic musings are at the heart of the game?

I’ve played Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy exactly two times. The first time was a four-player game, which I (shockingly) won. I remember feeling pleased, but not entirely sold on rolling handfuls of dice to see what happened. The next time was a huge, six-player affair, which took hours. In that game, I got my entire fleet wiped out with some crazy bad luck, and ended up isolated in my little corner of space, unable to make any inroads thanks to the hulking metal might of my neighbours. I spent two hours of that game miserably trying to get my remaining armada - a toaster floating in the void - into any kind of shape to be able to interact with the rest of the players again. I vowed then to never play it again.

So maybe dice-rolling in games just isn’t for me. At least not when it determines something important in the game. It turns out that that isn’t true at all.

There’s a game called Lords of Vegas. It puts the players in the roles of casino owners looking to illuminate the famous Strip with dazzling temples to gambling. Casinos. Multiple players can build the same colour of casino tile, and when they join up all of the players with a stake in that jumbo casino can choose to pay to reroll all of the dice in the casino. You want to do this sometimes, because the person with the highest value dice in a casino gets the previous points when it’s time to dole them out.

Usually, a player with multiple dice in a casino complex will win out. Probability and all that jazz. But the times when they don’t win, those times are uniquely wonderful. The gasps, cheers, and curse words with boundless creativity go up from the table and it’s a joy to behold. When a player with a single die in contention wins control of a big casino, it’s amazing. Even more so when they weren’t even the person who paid to reroll all those dice.

I’ve been on both sides of that experience. I’ve hollered and laughed when someone has gifted me control of a massive money-maker, and I’ve died inside when I’ve lost control to someone who invested a fiver and a Toffee Crisp into their stake. And you know what? Both times it was amazing. In both cases, I can’t remember who won the game in the end, but I remember the good time I had playing.

In this example, watching Lady Luck deliver a swift knee to the nads of someone makes the game better, not worse. But why?

It’s all to do with the theme of the game in question. Its setting. What the ultimate goal of the game is, and how important that goal is in the shared experience. In Andromeda’s Edge the goal is to be the player with the most points at the end of the game. In Lords of Vegas, the goal is the same. The difference comes in the level of interaction the game provides, and the talk around the table that it conjures up.

When you finish a game like Andromeda’s Edge or Eclipse, you probably won’t find yourself talking about that game with the players in the bar for a while afterwards. You won’t be regaling others with the rise and fall of your empire and laughing as you do so. When you finish a game like Lords of Vegas, or other games that rely on the whimsy of some dice - games like Long Shot: The Dice Game for example - you do. The peaks, troughs and loop-the-loops of the ride you all just took were taken together. You rode the rollercoaster together, as a group.

The only Euro games I can think of that use dice and don’t rely on mitigation mechanisms, that I really enjoy, are the ones which lean into the woe that only dice can bring. Troyes, for example. Dice get rolled, placed on the board, but your dice aren’t always your own. Someone can just swoop in and grab your dice and use them themself.

I also enjoy games where dice and their statistical probability are at the very core of them. Can’t Stop is a perfect example. The board for the game is literally a bell curve graph of dice roll distributions, but it’s amazing. Traditional games too, such as Backgammon. I love Backgammon, but the game is built around rolling dice, doing what you can with the numbers that come up, and the likelihood of them coming up. This, to me, is how dice should be used in a rolling dice game.

I’m sure there are people out there who love Andromeda’s mix of Euro and dice madness. I know there are, I know some of these people myself. But for me, when dice get rolled during a game to determine a thing, that thing needs to be in a very specific spot to make me happy. Not all games manage that, and that’s okay. It’s just something to bear in mind as your collection of games grows, and you step outside of your lane to try different games.

How about you? Have you played Andromeda’s Edge? What did you think of it? How do you feel about dice in games? Let me know, I’d love to know your opinion.