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BOARD GAME REVIEW: DICE FORGE

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As we enter another period of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s good to have some indoor activities to play with our bubbles. One of our favourite family pastimes is to play some board games. With a six year old on hand, we have been trying to get hold of some games that we can all play and for Christmas, we received a copy of Dice Forge – a dice crafting / combo game.

Official description of the game:

Forge your destiny!

Dice Forge is a development game featuring innovative mechanics based on dice with removable faces. In this dice crafting game, players build their own dice. Roll your dice, manage your resources, complete ordeals before your opponents and explore multiple winning strategies.

Now you control the luck of the dice!.

  • Publisher: libellud.com
  • Number of Players: 2 – 4
  • Play Time (Approx): 45 minutes
  • Ages: 10 +
Dice Forge - Game Components

Although the game is suggested for humans with ten years or more of life experience, the system is simple enough that with a little help, our six-year-old enjoyed the game as much as us elder folk. The core mechanic is simple: the game takes place over a pre-determined number of turns which consist of one round for each player. During a player’s round, all players roll their two customisable dice (more on that in a bit) and gain the results of their roll. Following this, they can use their current “effect” if they have one to help them and then they choose an action – this is either going on a “quest” or spending gold to customise one or both of their dice. Play then moves on. The objective is to have the most victory points at the end of the game.

Gameplay is achieved through a set of beautiful components that begin with the box itself. The game’s packaging is designed so that play can commence with little setup – simply place the central “board” and layout the cards in their set alcoves, select a player board, pawn, resource cubes and customisable dice and away you go. At the end of the game, spending a few minutes to reset the dice and store everything properly is well worth the small effort involved.

On to the key mechanic – the dice customisation that gives Dice Forge its name. This is a neat little idea that works well. Essentially, each die starts with one “stone” resource (you get one die with moon and one with fire). One of the dice has a victory point marker on and all the rest (five on one die and four on the other) have single gold resources. By earning gold (or by completing some quests – spending those moon resources) players can replace the faces of their dice with others that offer more options.

Dice Forge - Dice Customisation

For example, one face may offer the player their choice of resource while another rewards four victory points. There are also “special” faces that offer – for example – the ability to use the result of a die thrown by an opponent. The variety of dice and the randomness of rolling dice make this a fun and intriguing mechanic. With bad rolls, even a fully “forged” dice could see a player miss out.

Dice Forge - Player Board in Action

Players track their progress on some lovely player boards. These are thick cardboard elements with holes for the resource cubes to be nested in and spaces to place the player’s dice after rolling. The artwork on these (and indeed on all the components) is superb and lend a slightly cartoonish fun vibe to the world of Dice Forge. Players can also spend gold to extend their player board giving them the ability to amass more resources for spending later in the game. It is these simple but beautiful components that allow the game to flow so quickly as everything is easy to see and change as play progresses.

The main element of strategy in the game is balancing the completion of quests (through the spending of Moon and Fire stone resources) and spending money to customise your pair of dice to give you better options. Too much customisation can leave you with too few victory points. In the first game we played, I only upgraded my dice a couple of times, relying on completing quests and having an effect that meant on each of my rounds I could spend three gold resource to earn four victory points. Our six-year-old was obsessed with earning gold and customising her dice. Even though she lost, she had fun and enjoyed the game.

Dice Forge - Quest Board

Dice Forge is one of those great little games that are simple enough to pick up within a turn or two of play while still offering a balance of luck and skill that means a game can play out in a few different ways. It also comes with some more advanced components for when the first couple of games have been played and the flow is familiar.

We had a lot of fun with this as a family and look forward to playing it again soon. I think it’s one of those games that would comfortably sit as a beginning, fun middle or ending to a longer board game session whether this is within our bubbles or when we can roam the streets again. Dice Forge is most definitely a fantastic way to spend forty-five minutes with friends and family.

Rating: 4.5 / 5
Reviewer: WedgeDoc


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