Top 10 Best Dice Games

Dice and games, games and dice...they just go together. Here are my nominations for the ten best dice games, in no particular order:

Qwixx

Fun to play, hard to spell. You move higher on 2 tracks, and at the same time lower on 2 tracks, hoping for the right die roll in the right color. And you can even score on your opponent's turn.

Rattlebones

In Rattlebones, you actually create your own dice, thanks to an ingenious method of replacable die faces, and then use them to collect tokens in a creepy carnival.

Sorcerer City

You choose which tracks to advance in order to score. Sounds simple, but since one track affects another, it's really a fun and challenging mechanic.

Roll For the Galaxy

Your dice give you choices of actions, from exploring new worlds to shipping planetary resources. The trick here is guessing which actions your opponents will pick so you can piggyback on their dice.

Super Skill Pinball

I've never been a pinball fan, but I like using dice to decide which bumpers to hit for maximum ball time. More fun than actual pinball.

Sagrada

Sagrada wins the prize for most beautiful game. Draft the jewel-colored dice by color and number to try to create the highest-scoring pattern on your stained glass window.

Pirates Dice

Yes, it's just Liar's Dice with a Pirates of the Caribbean overlay, but the barnacle-encrusted cups have a cool texture, and the classic gameplay is still fun. Get yourself two copies and play with eight people for an awesome experience.

Dice Town

A Wild West overlay makes this game interesting as you choose which of the six stations on the street to try for. You need to roll the most of one face to become the Sheriff, pan for gold, have a shoot-out...

Martian Dice

The Martians are the good guys here, trying to roll and capture chickens, cows, and humans without being overpowered by tanks. A push-your-luck game.

Dice City

Not to be confused with Dice Town, players buy cards to lay out in their town grid, creating mines to roll resources, public buildings to roll special powers, and armies to roll attacks on other towns.

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Game Review -- Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

I received this cooperative tabletop game for my birthday. It would seem to be the perfect gift, since my siblings and I so enjoyed the Choose Your Own Adventure book series when it was a brand new thing.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, the CYOA books told a story in the second person, so that "you" were the protagonist. Then every few pages would end with a choice: if you open the door, turn to page 27, if you go back to the library, turn to page 42. You would make a choice, turn to the appropriate page, and continue the story. This went on until you came to an ending, but then you could go back and read the story again, make different choices, and wind up with a completely different ending.

This was amazing! A book with choices you made that turned out differently every time. And the board game does a good job of replicating that vibe. Through the use of numbered cards, you make choices that take you through different scenarios to the five stages, stopping places, really, of the story, all in your quest to solve a mystery surrounding a strange house.

It's certainly not a game of complex strategy. Some choices might be logical, but many are purely random as to whether they turn out well or badly for you. But the fact that "you" are the protagonist makes it easy to immerse yourself in the story, giving it a tingle of anxiety when you send yourself into a dangerous or frightening situation. At least it does for me as I try to imagine what I would really do if I was there. The ease of play also makes it perfect for game nights that include younger players, though we played with strictly adults.

The original book series that began so wonderfully soon degenerated into a ho-hum experience, due to many of the subsequent titles that lost sight of the elements that made the whole idea so appealing. Later books contained overlong narratives with fewer choices and unnecessary gimmicks, like endless loops, teaser pages you could never reach, and lack of bad endings. As if we kids couldn't take it when our character died from making foolish mistakes! And copycat books from other publishers were even worse. It's like they didn't "get" the appeal of the original.

And that is the one real problem with the CYOA game. It includes several failsafes to ensure that you win, that you avoid the bad endings and come to a good one. When you come to an ending where you die, and the game does include some, you are instructed to immediately go back to your last card and choose again. Why? If we die, we can take it, just like we could take it back when we read the books. Just like we can take it if we fail in any cooperative game.

Not only that, but if you happen to succesfully reach the end of a stage without having found every useful item in the game, you are given a chance to go back and search some more. Really? Why then give us choices at all if you're going to micromanage us into picking the right choice in the end?

In fact, because there is only one story in the game, the failsafes completely take away the game's replayability. And who wants to buy a game you can only play once? Oh, there is a die roll involved at times, to get you out of a dangerous situation. And it is possible to fail enough times to die. But, hey, just go back to the previous card, right? Wrong! Better to lose and then vow to play again tomorrow to show that game who's boss.

But fear not, reader. There is a simple workaround to fix this. When you die, ignore that return-to-the-last-card stuff. Dead is dead, no do-overs. And if you neglected to find the sword or the flashlight, that's your tough luck. Save it for your next trip to the House of Danger.

You'll still eventually go through every possible scenario in the game, but at least you'll have multiple plays before you do and get your money's worth of a simple, fun game to pass an hour with.

All contents are strictly my humble opinion.