Diceocracy

• Designer:  Tobias Hall
• Publisher: All or None games
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 12+
• Time: 90 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Ever since you were a kid, your mama told you that you’re destined for grand things! So you’re pretty certain that things can only be better with more “you” in it! Well, it’s finally time for more YOU …in the name of democracy! It just so happens there is an election in the city of Dicetopia coming up! As one of the promising stop-for-nothing candidates, you call for change and aim to enlighten the public of your magnificence… and you know, also make some stuff… better! It’s only one teeny tiny little ”problem” – Democracy is kind of up to the people, and the people are in this particular case… well, DICE!

In Diceocracy, you will use your political skills to attract voters from different districts and introduce them to your jaw-dropping politics by ”any means necessary”, you know, as long as you can get away with it anyway. The goal of the game is to get the most votes by just being YOU, with a fair bit of stern persuasion and political tricks.  Throughout the game, players will send out their representatives to recruit followers and influence the political landscape with different clever actions. Players will manipulate dice values and positions, take control over districts and shift representatives around. They will fundraise, advertise and use their dice followers to achieve populistic goals for increased popularity. By the end of the game, votes are counted from successfully pulled off political stunts, secret agendas, controlled districts and popularity among the different demographic groups!

The 8 district tiles are put on the table in four pairs, and Dice are rolled and placed on the corresponding colored spaces on each tile. These dice are called Demographic Dice.  Note that each tile also has some dice printed on the board which are always on that tile, but they cannot be modified or moved.  The three card decks (Ads, Political Stunts, Secret Agendas) are shuffled and placed near the district tiles, and 1 ad card and 1 stunt card is placed between each pair of District tiles..  The Twilight Congress board is set up with two candidate cubes from each player starting on the bottom row.

Players receive a candidate board and Candidate tile. Players also receive two Personality tiles (double sided) which they can arrange to make a two word description of their person.  Players then get 5 Secret Agenda cards to examine, keeping two to start the game. 

  Then before starting, choose which level of interaction you want in your game – Standard, Interactive or Spicy. 

The game is fairly simple, played over 9 rounds.  In each round, players each take a turn, following the same four phases.

1] Send a representative to a district tile 

2] Take a die from that District and leave your Rep meeple in the die’s place

3] Place the die on to your candidate board and make it a Follower

4] In any order, take the action of the district tile and the newly placed die – examples of the actions are:

• Advertising/Political Stunt – take a card either from the corresponding deck or face up next to a District tile that you occupy
• Demographic Exchange – Swap two Demographic Dice
• Focus – Change a Demographic tile on a District tile or a Follower Die on your board by +/- 1
• Follower Influence – Swap a Follower Die from your board with a Demographic die on a District Tile
• Fundraising – Move your money marker forward
• Manipulate – Roll a Demographic Die or one of your Follower Dice and then decide to keep the roll or not
• Rep Influence – Sway one of your reps on a District tile with a Demographic die on a District tile
• You can always choose not to take your district tile action to: decide the next First Player, to draw a Secret Agenda card (and then discard one), or to move a Follower die to a different position on your board.

5] You may Play one Advertising card and one Political Stunt card at the end of your turn.  Advertising cards cost money to play, and give you all sorts of benefits.  Political Stunt cards require your Follower Dice to be in certain arrangements to provide you their benefits.

After 9 rounds, the game ends. Players now count their votes, using the Twilight Congress board as a scoreboard.

• Votes from Political Stunt cards
• District Votes – the player with the most reps on a District tile gains votes equal to the pips on the dice left in the District.  Ties are split, rounded up.
• Color Points – in each District, the player with the most reps scores votes for the color of the dice left in the district (pip value x multiplier found on player board). Ties get to choose the matching fraction of dice to score.  Players who do not have a majority get to score one value 1 die per Rep present.
• Secret Agendas cards score
• Candidate Bonus – if you have a bonus criteria on your Candidate card, and you meet those criteria, score those points

The player with the most votes wins.

My thoughts on the game

Diceocracy was a game that hadn’t received a lot of pre-show attention at Spiel 2025, but I had heard a number of good things about it from some of my colleagues, and I wanted to try it out.  The designer was unknown to me prior to this game, but he has a number of designs to his credit on BGG.

There are three levels of interaction that you can play with – and the basic game doesn’t allow you to move any of your opponent’s pieces.  This makes for a more friendly game and one which you can plan better – but it also makes it so that majorities can be locked in.  At the other extreme, everything is fair game for replacement/moving, but this also raises the chaos level of the game.  In that sense, you can pick the version of the game that suits you best.

Diceocracy is a thinky game where players have to try to make the most of their 9 turns.  Overall strategies can be determined from the player’s Secret Agenda cards, though in my experience, the area majority game is the part which needs to be focused on the most, and I try to make this clear in the rules teach.

The reason for this is that the area majority ends up scoring twice – both for the pips left on in the region as well as for the color scoring.  It would not be uncommon for a majority to score 30 or 40 points in a game.  As some of the dice are pre-printed on the tiles, there is a fair amount of the endgame scoring which can be guaranteed (i.e. no one can move or alter those dice).

Of course, as you are playing the game, you have more things to consider than simply going for the majority in one or two of the tiles.  Each of the tiles has its own associated action, and you might end up wanting to place a meeple in a particular city in order to take advantage of that action.  

Regardless of where you place, you’ll have an interesting decision of where to put your die on your player board.  You’ll probably have certain patterns that you’re trying to make for your Political Stunt card bonuses, but you’ll also possibly be motivated to place the die in a particular place in order to trigger a particular action. 

As you can see, there are definitely layers of decisions to be made here – but again, I’d remind everyone that in the end, scoring 7 points for a nice Political Stunt pattern will be totally dwarfed by a 30 point haul for a tile majority.

And, in the end, that is the sticking point of the game for me.  It has a lot of interesting ideas and crunchy little bits to think about.  But thus far, in my exploration of the game, the game comes down more to the simple strategy of having majorities on the tiles.   The game has a lot more fighting for majority in a 4p game (as well as many more ties for majority) – and this is a much more interesting game than the 3p games that we’ve played.

The game does have an interesting way to deal with this by allowing one player to change the player order for the next round; thus giving players earlier in turn order in the 8th round a better chance of giving themselves the hammer for the final round.  But, the magnitude of the area majority scoring still doesn’t change. I’d prefer a game where the interesting little decisions played a larger role in the final score instead of being an afterthought or a tie-breaker because I’d really like those interesting decisions to matter.  If they don’t, the game feels more like a race to be the first person to plunk 3 dudes down in a city to clearly state majority and take home the big points.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor