Many Short Games: Part the Fourth

Welcome to Many Short Games: Part the Fourth: Dice Games. These are games that are all about the dice, rather than games that have dice (and other components). 

Carcassonne Dice (Rio Grand Games): In all honesty, the original Carcassonne is the better game, especially if you have an expansion or two to liven it up.  But full Carcassonne can take a really long time to resolve, so if you want some Carcassonne action without the long play than you might try the dice version. With the dice, you get 3 rolls to build the biggest closed city you can (same rules as in the parent Carcassonne for city building-the city sections (black) must be capped and not have sides that are unfinished). Rolling a catapult ends the turn and nothing is scored. You can try to roll 3 knights, which will double your next turn’s score but you do not score the current round in which you choose to roll for the knights. The first person to 42 points wins.

Le Boomb (Mayfair Games): This is perhaps the silliest game in the Games Library.  It’s also probably the simplest. The die roll determines if the bomb stays put, moves or explodes. Players take turns rolling the die and the last one left unexploded wins.

Luchador! Mexican Wrestling Dice (Ninja Division). There looks to be a lot going on with this game other than dice…I mean, it has a little wrestling ring you build for your wrestling cut outs! With little elastic ropes! There’s even a championship belt, but when it comes down to it, all you really need are the dice.  On the other hand, this is Luchador Mexican wrestling so you probably do need the trappings. Each player chooses a champion to play and grabs a set of dice. Players simultaneously roll the dice and resolve the results. There are hits, misses, blocks counters and pins. For every hit you land that is not blocked or countered you get to roll a green Hit Die (the set that has choke hold, chair slam and table flipping among other moves). Your opponent also get a hit die for every hit of yours they counter.  If your opponent is pinable (i.e. they have lost X amount health) and you manage to pin them, you can roll the yellow pin dice to see how well you have done. Your opponent does get a chance to try and wiggle out of the pin (the other players are encouraged to take on the role of the referee and shout ONE! TWO! THREE! as the dice are rolled). You can also choose not to end the match and instead grandstand around yelling how awesome you are, which gets you a health point back. Because of course it does. Lastly, you can choose to do a signature Luchador move and roll the black dice for your awesome results. First Luchador to lose all their health does not take home the championship belt.

Quixx (Gamewright): Quixx is a sort of Yahtzee-like game in that you are trying to roll a set number on the dice. The twist is, that once you mark the results in the scorecard, you’ve locked out all the scores to the left of the one just marked. The warm colored dice (yellow and red) go small to large in number while the cool (green and blue) go large to small. Marking a 10 on a blue in the first round isn’t horrible since you can still roll 9-2 but marking a 10 on red just leaves you 11 and 12 for the rest of the game. Not a great opening move. The active player rolls all the dice and sums the white dice. All players can choose to cross out that number on their scoresheet in one of the colors if they want to. The active player then gets to add one of the white dice to one of the colored dice and has the option to cross out the sum on the appropriate colored row. If you can’t cross out a box, you get to check one of the penalty boxes at the bottom of the scoresheet. The game ends when 2 rows have been locked out (crossed out to the furthest right box) or someone has crossed out their fourth penalty box. Add the scores and the person with the highest total wins.

Zombie Dice (Steve Jackson Games): Zombie Dice is perhaps the best game to play on the last day of Con when you have about 1 and a half brain cells to rub together. There is some maths involved but a good phone app can take care of that.  You can also play up to 99 people but I don’t recommend going over 10. The active player puts all the dice in the can and shakes them up. They then remove 3 dice and roll them. Keep any brains to score, set aside any shotgun blasts and set aside any feet (escapees) to reroll. If there are not 3 shotgun blasts, the player can reroll any escapee dice plus enough dice from the can to make 3 to roll. The third shotgun blast ends the turn without scoring. The active zombie player can choose to end their turn at any time and add the number of brians rolled to their score. The first player to 13 brains triggers endgame and everyone else gets 1 more chance to beat the high score.