CHENNAI: Dice Throne is unashamed of wearing its heart on its sleeve when it comes to its inspirations. Let’s start with the backstory, which features a mad tyrant who organises a tournament and...if you’re not already humming the Mortal Kombat theme by this point, I’m not sure what more you need. In gameplay terms as well, it’s easy to trace this game’s lineage and what it’s derived from; but it’s quite a surprise what those games are and how well it manages to blend them.
Before carrying on, a word on Dice Throne’s catalogue — in the beginning, there was a single boxed set called Season 1 which was followed by the inevitable Season 2. However, it was also decided to release each four ‘battle boxes’ alongside that second set, each featuring two of the characters from Season 2 going head-to-head in a smaller box. This was and remains a great move, because it allows you to try Dice Throne and see if you like it at a much lower price point than buying the full set, and I’d love to see more of this in the future!
Although you can play Dice Throne at higher player counts, I’ll largely be treating it as a 1v1 game today because that feels like the most natural fit for it. Each of the players will begin by selecting a character from the available roster — you’ve got a Wild West-style gunslinger, a formidable samurai, an Amazonian warrior, a Doctor Octopus-esque mad scientist, a vampire lord, a cursed pirate and...the list goes on, but you get the idea. Once you grab your character’s board, deck of cards and dice, you’re ready to go. Each of you starts with 50 health, and whoever manages to reduce their opponent’s health to 0, wins.
For most of its turn structure, Dice Throne feels quite reminiscent of many other games of this genre; most notably, a little card game called Magic: The Gathering. You’ll resolve start-of-turn effects, draw a card and gain the equivalent of mana before you enter a ‘main phase’. Here’s where things start to get interesting — your board consists a series of skills that you can activate with your dice later on in the turn, and some of the cards in your deck are straight upgrades of those skills. So as a game of Dice Throne progresses, your character goes through an evolution of sorts, which is always a cool idea when it’s executed as well as this. There are other card types, but those are more straightforward fare. Whenever you’re done, you move on to the combat phase where the game suddenly flips the script.
You see, in the combat phase, you’re effectively playing a game of Yahtzee with your character’s dice, trying to get various combinations in order to activate the skills on your board. Many games have used Yahtzee’s dice rolling as a foundation — King of Tokyo comes to mind — because it’s a system that works so well, and it’s no different here. This is where the differences between characters make themselves felt — the gunslinger feels nimble and harder to hit while she keeps up a constant rain of fire, for example, whereas the samurai feels like a slower-moving tank of sorts but you definitely don’t want to let him get within striking distance. It’s a phenomenal mix of theme and gameplay, and it feels incredibly smooth to play.
All this, and I haven’t even spoken about how Dice Throne plays as a free-for-all or team-vs-team game! There’s a good reason for that, though — it’s because I’ve never played either of those modes. I’m sure they’re good, but let’s be honest here; if you buy this, you’re doing so because of how it plays as a 1v1 head-to-head duel. It’s a crowded genre of game, true, but Dice Throne is an absolute gem and it’s one of the best games I’ve played recently.
Arjun Sukumaran
http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)