Dice Conquest

• Designers: Stephen Avery and Eugene Bryant
• Publisher: Wizkids
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Wizkids

Dice Conquest is a 2022 Wizkids release, new to many at SPIEL 2022, that puts the players together on a team of Heroes fighting off creatures, trying to get to Kalterstorm the Dragon.  If they are able to defeat this boss monster, they win.  If any of the Heroes dies at any point on this quest, the whole team loses!

The game offers 8 different heroes to choose from, and players can choose who they want to play with.  Each hero comes with a special ability written on the bottom of the card.  Heroes also have a special Critical Hit ability that comes into play whenever the player uses a die with his Critical Hit number showing.

A Start Player is chosen in some manner.  Each player gets a health tracker card and a player aid card as well.  The Creature deck is shuffled, and the Kalterstorm card is placed at the bottom.  The top 3 cards of the Creature deck are placed on the table in a display, and if there are any Reveal actions on those cards, they are immediately resolved.   The group has a traditional set of 7 polyhedral dice at the ready: d4, d6, d8, d10, d10, d12, d20.  

The game will be played in a series of rounds, continuing until either the Dragon is slain (the bottom card in the Creature deck) or one of the Heroes dies, thus meaning all the players lose.  A round is started by having the Start Player roll the 7 dice.  They are placed in a row near the display of Creature cards.  

On a turn, the active player will choose any of the available dice, and use it to attack a Creature.  The player can either choose to keep the current value of the chosen die, or he can re-roll it once, being obligated to accept the new number.  This dice is placed on any Creature card, doing an amount of damage equal to the number on it.  (Well, except for the d10, where a zero = ten damage, and the d100 where you only use the tens digit, and again the 0 on the die equals ten damage.)  

If the total on the dice exceeds the Health value of the creature, it is slain.  If there is a Magic Item on the creature card, give it to any hero.  (Magic Items are one-time use abilities that can be done at any time). Otherwise, simply discard the slain Creature.  The dice on that card are placed in the Spent Dice area.

The round continues until all the Creatures have been defeated or all the dice have been used or any player chooses to pass on their turn.  If there are creatures left, the players take damage from the remaining creatures; total up the damage values on the creatures, and dole them out, one at a time, starting with the current Start Player and going around the table.  Now the players can choose to remove any dice from Creatures that are not yet killed; those dice are added to the Spent Dice area.

The next round is started; the Start Player moves clockwise, and 3 new Creature cards are drawn from the deck.  Again, resolve any Reveal effects as new creatures are added to the table.  Any dice not on cards are re-rolled and the next round begins.  Again continue this until one of the end-game conditions happens.

My thoughts on the game

Well, when I first got this small box game in the mail, I didn’t think much off it – the Eurogamer in my being slightly turned off by the traditional 7 polyhedral die set prominently displayed in the box window.  So, it sat on the shelf for a few weeks waiting its turn to hit the table.  I’m a bit sad that I waited for it – as this has proven to be a fun cooperative game.  

The rules to the game are quite simple and you can pretty much get started in about 5 minutes after opening up the packaging, and it’s just the right length for this sort of game for me – about 20 minutes now.

The decisions are surprisingly tough.  Sure, sometimes it’s evident what you want to do with a 19 on a d20.  But, when you get past the initial no-brainers, there is often a fair amount of discussion that needs to happen as the group plans their best play.  Lots of times, we’ll have heated discussions about when to risk a re-roll on a die.  Also, we’ll have lots of talk about how to best use our special abilities – which often require a certain number on a die in order to trigger.  Sometimes we have to figure out who we want to kill a monster in order to distribute the magic items around in a way that benefits us.

Though the number of cards revealed each round never changes, it does seem like the game gets progressively harder as you just know that you’re going to have three new monsters each round – so the group really needs to prioritize getting at least 2 gone each round.  Further, you don’t want to keep too many dice on cards between rounds as you lose the ability to roll them at the start of the next round.  Oh, yeah, and you take damage for each monster left alive; that’s not good either.  

The game has been fairly challenging thus far; I’d guesstimate that we’re winning just over half of the games that we play.  We have yet to add the trap cards which are in the box for a more difficult game – we’re pretty happy with the challenge in the base rules (whatever that may or may not say about our cooperative playing abilities or our dice-rolling skillz).  For twenty to thirty minutes and a small box, there is a lot of game here!

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mark J:  Cooperative dice drafting/assignment dungeon crawl… worked fine as a solo but would slow way down with more players.

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Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Steph
• I like it.  Dale
• Neutral.  Mark J
• Not for me…