Castle Dice: 7 Pounds of Gaming Goodness

Overview: Here's a fun game that combines resource management, worker placement, and a whole lot of dice. You're competing to build the best castle in seven rounds of play, but watch out for those barbarians! Castle Dice is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.

Players: 2 to 4 (with solitaire version in development)

Ages: 12 and up (but I bet younger players familiar with resource-management games could handle it)

Playing Time: 45 minutes

Retail: $65 on Kickstarter; $28 for dice & PDF version

Rating: Lots of dice-rolling fun, pretty easy to pick up except for a few odd mechanics, but it's still being fine-tuned.

Who Will Like It? If you like rolling big piles of dice, Castle Dice certainly has those in spades — but the drafting mechanic mitigates the crazy luck factor. And it's about building castles. The name pretty much says it.

Theme:

There's a medieval theme about building castles, hiring workers, and accumulating livestock (and then slaughtering them for the feast). Barbarians come in and steal resources; various types of workers help you accumulate resources more quickly; guards protect resources. There are merchants who let you trade resources and farmers who help you acquire livestock, and plenty of other types of people who show up to help you or hinder your foes.

The connection between the mechanics and the theme can be a little loose, though. Okay, having the most horses lets you go first. But why does having the most chickens increase your hand limit? Why does the "Daughter" give you the same action as the "Pork Chop"? That gets a little hazier.

What's interesting to note is that the game actually started off as a Minecraft-themed game, just as a fun personal challenge. They ended up showing it off at MineCon in 2011 and meeting with the Mojang folks, but ultimately didn't get the license to make it DiceCraft, so they went in a different direction. So in some cases the current terminology for things still carries over some remnants from the Minecraft idea and that may be why there are some quirks in the theme.

For the most part, though, while I was playing the game I wasn't really thinking in terms of Minecraft and it seemed to work — and sometimes lend itself to funny conversations, like my comment: "Those aren't houses. Those are pigs."

Components:

I played with a homemade prototype set, which was a bunch of dice with stickers on them, but the final product will actually have molded dice. So I can't speak to the quality of the final components, but I can give you the list of components at least. One note is that currently they're planning to use 12mm dice, similar to those in Quarriors, but if they hit a $44k stretch goal then they'll upgrade them to 15mm, which are more like standard six-sided dice.

The way the dice work is that each color is tied to a particular resource: brown dice have wood, grey dice have stone, yellow dice have gold, and so on. Each die also has one face that's a Barbarian, and each die also has some number of animals. Wood, the most common resource, shows up a lot on the brown dice — you can even get two or three Wood on one die. But Iron is harder to get, so there are fewer faces showing iron (and more showing animals).

The game comes with:

• 65 dice
• 121 Cards: 47 Villager Cards, 47 Castle Cards, 18 Feast Cards
• 4 Player Mats
• 1 Turn Tracker Mat
• 60 Animal Tokens (Horses, Pigs, Cows, Chickens)
• 50 Worker Tokens
• 21 Tracking Beads

According to the Kickstarter page the game is over seven pounds, though I don't know if that's their current prototype or the 12mm dice. Either way, it's a lot of bits. They offer a free Print & Play version here, though you'll have to make 65 custom dice, and one of the pledge levels is $28 for just the dice, and you can make your own player mats and tokens. Not a bad way to get a cheaper version but still get the high-quality dice.

In the version we played, I thought the player mats worked all right, but there are some things that should be spelled out a little better and some of the turn order text is less necessary — but presumably a lot of that can be tweaked before printing.

Gameplay:

You can download a beta version of the rules here in case you want to read it for yourself.

Everyone gets a player mat and starts with their tracker beads on "zero" for each resource: Wood, Stone, Gold, Land, and Iron. The dice, animal tokens, and worker tokens are placed in a supply pile, and the turn tracker mat is placed somewhere on the side of the playing area.

The goal of the game is to build the best castle in seven rounds — as determined by victory points. You can also get some victory points for other things (having the most chickens, for instance) or with certain Feast cards, but most of the points will come through castle sections.

Each round, players will get to draw cards until they have five in hand. You can discard any number of cards before drawing, but then you must choose how many you'll draw from the Castle deck and how many from the Villager deck before looking at the new cards you've drawn. The Castle deck has all the various parts of the castle to build, but also has some people who can give you special one-time-use abilities. The Villager deck is where you'll get various Workers like the Miners, Merchants, Guards, and Farmers.

In each round, every player will roll some predetermined set of dice as shown on the turn tracker mat (e.g., in Round One you roll 2 brown, 2 grey, and 1 gold). In addition, you'll get to choose two or three extra dice to roll. Once everyone has chosen their extra dice, all the dice are rolled. Any Barbarians you roll go onto your player mat in the Barbarians area; all the other dice (showing animals and resources) are placed in the World Pool in the center of the table.

Starting with the first player, each player picks one die from the pool. If it's an animal, you get the corresponding animal token and place it on your mat. If it's a resource, you move the appropriate tracker. The die goes back to the supply. Players gather until there are no more dice left.

Then players have the opportunity to slaughter animals for the Feast. For each complete set of animals you return to the supply, you'll get one of the Feast cards, which have powerful effects or are worth victory points. Feast cards don't count toward your five-card limit. On rounds 3, 5, and 7, there are mandatory feast days, so if you have complete sets of animals you must slaughter them at this time.

Next, Miners work: if you have any Miners, they produce one extra resource of their type. Next, Merchants work: for each merchant you have, you can discard one resource to get a resource that's one level rarer (e.g., trade 1 Stone for 1 Gold).

Then you build: you can build any card from your hand as long as you have the resources to pay for them. Castle parts are placed next to your player mat. If you build a worker, then you take a worker token and place them in the appropriate spot on the play mat. Miners must be placed on the most common resource first, so you have to have a Wood Miner before you can get the Stone Miner. Guards can be placed on any of the resource types, and they protect that particular resource from the Barbarians. You can have up to three Merchants, and up to three Farmers, which let you get bonus animals when you take animals from the pool.

Finally, the Barbarians raid. For each Barbarian you have on your player mat, you lose one of each resource that isn't protected by a Guard. Then the round ends, the turn tracker is moved to the next turn, and the game continues until all seven rounds have been played.

There are a few other rules that come into play. For instance, most of the Castle parts will provide some sort of bonus. The Royal Chambers allow you to pick one extra die; the Deep Moat lets you take a resource instead of the animal shown on a die. Also, the animals themselves offer a bonus for the person who has the most of them. The player with the most horses gets to go first. The player with the most pigs can do a "Pork Chop" action (picking the face of a die when they gather); the player with the most cows can change a worker into a different type of worker; the player with the most chickens gets an extra card draw.

At the end of the game, the player with the most chickens also gets an extra victory point, and the player with the most total workers also earns a bonus victory point. Whoever has the most points wins!

Conclusion:

A couple of the guys from Fun to 11 (who also ran the Kickstarter for Miskatonic School for Girls) live just outside of Portland, so they brought their prototype down and taught it to me and a few folks from my gaming group. It took a bit longer than the advertised 45 minutes, but we were learning the game and we stopped often to make comments or ask questions. I can see it getting much faster once we knew what we were doing and if we weren't also trying to give feedback about the game design itself.

Castle Dice is a lot of fun: getting to roll handfuls of dice is always a blast, but I also really liked the dice drafting mechanic. If you roll a bunch of barbarians, you've had some pretty bad luck, but otherwise everyone's dice are all in a big pool. Then you actually get some strategy because you have to decide which resources to take from this limited supply, and you have to guess what your opponents will want so they don't snatch it away from you. That part reminds me a little of Take It or Leave It — a little bit of press-your-luck in which dice you leave for your opponents. In addition, the ability to add a couple of dice of your choice adds to the strategy: if you know you'll need a lot of gold for what you're building, then you better add all yellow dice in case some of them don't come up with gold.

The game is sort of a mix between Euro-style games and American games, because you get the drafting and resource management, but you also get a little bit of "take that" as well. There are cards that let you send your barbarians to another player, or steal animals from everyone. That can get pretty aggressive, although those are mostly in the Feast cards which can be harder to get if you're also building a lot.

Speaking of the Feast cards, there was some discussion about the idea of slaughtering animals. Again, that's in keeping with the medieval theme — you slaughter a bunch of animals for a feast, right? But some of us thought that might be off-putting for some players, particularly those who don't want to explain all of that to their kids. Vegetarians might not appreciate the frequent slaughters, either — and most of us thought it was a little weird that horses were included in the feast. I don't know if that'll change or not in the final game; it didn't bother me too much, but it would also be easy to say you're selling the animals at market to pay for a feast ... of mutton.

There was also some confusion about some of the terminology. "Miners" are the workers who get you more resources: but they might get you wood or land, which doesn't really seem like the sort of thing miners do. That seems like a holdover from the Minecraft idea, and our suggestion was to make it "laborers" or something more generic. The "Pork Chop" action is also a little weird — it's a fine game mechanic, but having the player mat just say "Pork Chop" means that we had to keep asking what it meant. Little things like that would make the game go more smoothly for new players without actually changing the mechanics of the game.

Castle Dice is a pretty good mix of luck and strategy. The cartoony artwork keeps the tone light-hearted although you can play cutthroat if you really wanted to. The biggest barrier for most may be the price: $65 is a lot for a game, even one that has huge piles of dice involved, so I do appreciate the $28 level that lets you make the mats, cards, and tokens yourself. Making cards can be a bit of a pain, but not nearly as difficult as making all those custom dice. Their limited early bird level adds an art print but doesn't drop the price any; personally I would have preferred a slightly cheaper copy as the early bird and I think they might be filling up those 400 slots more quickly.

Overall, it's a great idea and not exactly like anything I've played before. I'm not sure if this hits a full 11 on the fun meter for me, but it's still pretty high and I'd love for it to be produced and find its way into stores. If you're not sure, there's still a few weeks left so you can check out the rules and the print and play for a much more in-depth look. Visit the Kickstarter page for more.

Wired: Dice-drafting mechanic is a great way to collect resources; preliminary art looks pretty good.

Tired: Some wonky terminology; kind of pricey.

Thanks to Dave and Kai for making the trip down to Portland to show us the game!