LogFAQs > #932738105

96. Dice Forge (2017)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: "Deck-building," tableau-building
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 25-35 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 2-3 sessions (2018) with 3-4 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - Dice Forge is a victory point game in which you roll a pair of dice each player's turn and gain the shown resources. What makes Dice Forge unique among games of its genre is that your dice's faces are removable. For a price, as in deck-building, you can remove one of your dice's faces and attach on a new one. You can also spend your resources to gain special abilities or take special actions, which will generally give you victory points.

Design - Craftable dice are a great idea. It's Dice Forge's signature mechanic (and what it's named for), and it . Occasionally dice will make you feel bad. That is the nature of dice. But it's fun to decide in Dice Forge between whether you want to create one uber-die or whether you want to even out the variance between your two dice so you're guaranteed something decent each round off both rolls.

The mechanic itself isn't perfect. Crafting the dice can be a little clumsy and requires some precise technique. The dice themselves are rather large (which makes sense, given their faces have to have space to be modular) and don't roll as satisfyingly as some other dice. It's also a little unfortunate that Dice Forge, while having a pleasing aesthetic in terms of color palette and art, can be a little visually noisy and unclear.

Dice Forge has a clear arc to the game, which will feel familiar to people who play engine-building games. The first part of the game is dominated by the desire for gold, sine that's the resource which will allow you to upgrade your die faces. But around the midway point of the game (which has a fixed number of rounds), your focus will shift to the red and blue resources, which are generally what you spend to score victory points. The game also plays incredibly quickly; because of its Catan/Machi Koro-esque feature where you get resources on everyone's turns, you'll almost always have something productive, if not optimal, to do.

Future - For some reason, I never crave playing Dice Forge. It's not quite as elegant as the highest-ranking filler-weight games on my list; there's overhead to explain and set up and it's a little fiddly. But when I think about its design or whether I want to play it, the answer is a resounding yes, perhaps more so than games listed above it. Probably has decent potential to rise if I make it a point to request this. (This review of the games I've played is giving me ideas on what to request at future game nights...)
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness