Rule 0 is Alive! New dice game
Posted by Rob Herman at March 27th, 2008
The exile has returned…
I haven’t even been away from boardgaming; I’ve been largely posting my thoughts at the ‘Geek, in many ways a better place to write because the audience is larger and individual writings can be smaller. But I don’t want to let Rule 0 die! After some thought, I’ve decided that I’d like to turn Rule 0 into a design journal. After making this decision, it was just a matter of waiting until I had another design that excited me…
The inspiration came when I played To Court The King. Capsule summary: Yahtzee with card that give you extra powers, like rolling more dice and changing the dice you roll. It’s a fine game, quick and playable (2+++ I think) that suffers from a couple of flaws:
- It’s pretty much non-interactive. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting.
- You get so many chances to roll that die-manipulator effects are embarrassingly poor next to die-adding effects.
But I found the actual playing pretty compelling, so I set off to create a design that meets the following parameters:
- Solitaire. This will be an explicitly solo game.
- Will follow To Court The King’s basic pattern of starting with a small number of dice, and using them to make ever-bigger patterns and gain additional powers
- Both die-adding and die-manipulating powers should be important
- The game should be winnable/losable; not just a score but a binary yes/no. The ending should be tense. Even a good player should not always win. A way to “dial down” the difficulty should not be difficult to add.
My working title for this game is “Solo Dice Quest”–something non-inane to follow–and there should be more updates in the days ahead.
Good to hear you are designing again, Rob. I would be happy to playtest your work.
Welcome back!
I agree with your take on To Court The King. (For the most part: The ideal strategy is probably to accumulate 5 extra dice cards and about 3 cards with powers. So getting extra dice is more powerful, but it’s not unbalanced.)
I spent some time trying to think about how its mechanic might be added into a more complex Eurogame, with resource gathering, multiple paths to follow, etc. I think there’s some potential there, but I didn’t get very far. I’m not sure how to keep that from ballooning into a super-complex game and/or a very luck-based one. Your solitaire idea is probably the right way to start playing with the mechanics.
Glad to see you posting again. Could you update the blog with any articles you write for BGG?
Thanks for the kind words, everyone.
In the near future I will post a list of links to BGG articles I have written during the Rule 0 hiatus; in the future I will try to either crosspost or link anything meaty I post there.
Have you played Airships or Kingsburg? They’re both dice-fests that apparently improve on To Court The King’s mechanics.
In Airships, you can choose between rolling for resources (which make you more powerful on later rolls) or rolling to build the ships (which gives you victory points). It also has three different colors of dice: all D6’s, but with different mixes of values.
Kingsburg has probably the highest BGG rating of any dice game. Reading through the comments about it, I couldn’t decide for sure what gameplay features best describe it, so I’ll just have to play to find out. The one notable thing I did find interesting was that after three turns (seasons) of building resources, there is a fourth in which you fight off invading hordes.
Both of these seem to de-emphasize re-rolling and powers to change dice around, so they have more room for strategy and building resources that aren’t just additional dice.