Monday 9 June 2014

New Games For Old: Modern Alternatives to... Yahtzee

Were you ever a child? If so, were you ever subjected to the mindless tedium of Yahtzee? (The dice game, not the video game critic, that is.) The answer is that you probably were. But never fear. It gets better.

Yahtzee stands as one of the quintessential children's games of almost-pure-luck masquerading as strategy.
Picture by J Weintraub
At least such non-games as Snakes and Ladders or Candyland have the decency to be honest about their total lack of anything resembling strategy or real player agency, and so are appropriately restricted to children. Yahtzee, the game in which you roll dice, try to get whatever is most probable given your initial roll, and always take whichever result is clearly the least probable by the end of turn, is a game I have witnessed being played by teenagers and, shockingly enough, actual adults.

But still... there's something to be said for rolling a bunch of dice, choosing how and when to push your luck, cursing the dice gods, laughing at others' misfortune, and having the whole thing over with in a short period of time. So which modern dice-rollers can deliver more game with (if possible) even more dice rolling?

King of Tokyo

So successful it's verging on being a mainstream game itself, King of Tokyo is the game of giant creatures attacking Tokyo and each other through with the medium of giant, or at least overweight, dice. Designed by Richard Garfield (probably most famous for Magic: The Gathering), this is a game with huge and obvious advantages over its ancestor. For one thing, the game has more variety; rather than just trying to get specific combinations of numbers, the dice of King of Tokyo are number 1-3, with the other faces depicting a claw, a lightning bolt, and a heart. On their turn, players roll six dice, then reroll whichever they choose up to two
Picture by Gary James
times. The numbers have the more familiar dice mechanics - roll three of any kind and get the number of points on that triplet's faces, with further of the same kind adding an additional point. Where it gets interesting are the other faces. While the points system provides a method of racing your opponents to victory, claws smack your opponents about - this is a game of direct confrontation, not just abstract points accumulation. You can win the game by reaching 20 points first, or by eliminating all your rivals, and each outcome is as likely as the other. Meanwhile, hearts repair that damage, and thunderbolts provide "energy" - essentially the game's currency, which allows monsters to buy cards. Some of these cards provide immediate rewards; others provide special abilities, creating asymmetry between players as well as a measure of long-term planning. These simple mechanics provide much more of a game, with a variety of possible strategies (loosely falling into points or damage strategies, but with variety in both), and replayability facilitated by the subset of cards available in each game. Expansions have been released to give further variety, each retaining simple mechanics. While still a game with a high luck factor, it combines both meaningful push-your-luck mechanics and an amount of forward planning to provide players a decent amount of agency and strategy. Plus, giant monsters.

Elder Sign

Alternatively, maybe you're tired of competition anyway. Perhaps you view dice in a different way; since their result is ultimately arbitrary, it may make more sense to compete with the uncaring universe rather than the other players. In that case, you might want to look at the range of cooperative dice games available.

Picture by Leone Fenzi
Elder Sign is one of the most popular of these. Though sometimes referred to as "Arkham Horror Lite", it really has nothing in common with its cousin beyond theme and a reliance on chance. In this game, players are racing to acquire arcane knowledge before an ancient evil awakens; they do so by completing a number of tasks, each of which require certain specific dice results. As with King of Tokyo, the dice faces are unique, but have less intrinsic meaning (the Terror symbols have side effects in specific tasks, and magnifying glasses are cumulative, but otherwise differences are purely thematic). Players can acquire objects and spells to improve their dice rolls or gain additional dice, and even have certain special effects (such as eliminating monsters, or opening up high-risk high-reward otherwordly areas). 

Players who do not complete the task on the first roll may reroll, but sacrifice a die to do so, and may only hold over a single die from their first roll; in practice, this makes it difficult to complete the task if the player hasn't succeeded within the first couple of rolls. The game has some other issues; for example, as a fulfilled task gives additional resources, but failures use up resources without replacing them, there is a tendency to "snowball" and either keep winning or keep losing. This problem is not fully solved by the game's market mechanic to buy resources. Long-term strategy plays a fairly minor role, and overall the game suffers from too many rules for the degree of tactical thinking it provides. Nonetheless it's a fun light co-op with a theme that appeals to many, and digital versions exist to try it out for the price of a fancy coffee.

Escape: The Curse Of The Temple

But Elder Sign is far from the be-all and end-all of dice-rolling cooperative games. If you want a game with tighter mechanics, shorter playing time, and a hell of a lot more energy, try Escape: The Curse Of The Temple. Here, players each have their own handful of dice, and roll them to create combinations which open up new rooms of a temple, move between those rooms, and claim the gems therein. Each time a die face is used for an action, the die must be rerolled. The more gems claimed, the easier it is to leave the temple... and the game is only won if all players successfully leave.

Picture by the author
So what's the catch? Elder Sign has an ancient evil creeping closer to awakening turn-by-turn. "Escape" has no turns at all. Players roll their dice as fast as they can; the entire game is in real time, with a strict ten minute limit. If anyone is still left behind when that time is up, everybody loses. To make life even harder, dice have "black skull" faces - roll this result, and the die is locked, useless until a golden skull is used to release it. Players in the same room can combine dice for bigger rewards, which is essential to get enough gems at higher player numbers; crucially, other players can use their golden skulls to release the dice of other players. Since a handful of black skulls induces total paralysis, this is an essential manoeuvre. The result is a madcap game of players screaming things like "we just need two more keys" or "please will somebody give me just a single gold", desperately watching the gems stack up as the timer runs down, rolling their own dice as quickly as possible while cajoling their companions. It's like the Crystal Maze, only all the players are doing the challenge at the same time, and all are going to get locked in if any one of them fails the task.

This is probably the most stressful game you will ever play. But it's also a whole lot of fun. Simple mechanics and the ten-minute time limit keep it short and sweet, accessible to beginners, but stimulating for anyone. Definitely recommended.

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