Super Dice Battle

• Designer: Wade Piche
• Publisher: Ephyrean Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 5-30 min
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4w2PLgM
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Choose your fighter and play your combo cards to KO your opponent before they KO you. Super Dice Battle uses a custom set of dice to mimic a video game controllers D-Pad and Buttons to create your combos. Utilize the Super Die for more powerful attacks and unleash your most powerful combos to become the Super Dice Champion! 

In Super Dice Battle, players roll their Combo Dice as fast as they can in an attempt to complete the combos on their Character Card. When a player completes a combo by committing matching results, they grab and roll the Super Die to determine damage and apply the results to an opposing player in hopes to KO their opponents. 

Each fighter will get a set of 4 custom 8-sided dice. These dice are used to complete your combos by performing a roll. In the game, players roll their dice in real time, choosing to commit one die from each roll to their board, always going from left to right in any particular combo. . Each fighter has 4 unique combos that they are trying to complete. 2 combos are OFFENSIVE. These are how you will typically deal damage to another fighter. One SPECIAL combo grants players a unique effect. Lastly, each fighter has a DEFENSIVE combo which can be used to negate damage. Combos are considered complete when each button has been rolled within the white zone.  Bonus effects can be triggered if players decide to go for the black zone on a combo. 

This is an excellent strategy to do more damage but at a potential cost of leaving your fighter open for more attacks. When resolving an OFFENSIVE combo, fighters roll the SUPER DIE! This twelve-sided die has two different Icons on it. A Hit result and a Dot result. A Hit result will deal 10% Damang to the defending player. Dot results are used for certain effects and abilities. 

A GAME CAN BE PLAYED IN ONE OF TWO MODES: Victory Points and Stock. In Victory points, when a fighter KO’s another fighter they may claim one of their Stock tokens. When one player has claimed 3 Stock tokens from their opponents, they are victorious! In Stock, each player begins the game with a predetermined amount of Stock (or Life tokens). When a player is KO’d they remove one of their Stock tokens and any damage or dice assigned to their Fighter. 

When a player has run out of Stock tokens, they are Eliminated, and the last player standing is victorious! 

My thoughts on the game

Though it’s been a hot minute, I used to love playing fighter games on my Super NES or Genesis (or was it a NeoGeo).  Anyways, this game promises the fun of those button mashers of yore.  I still remember reading through Nintendo Power or EGM to find those hidden combos that I would then spend hours trying to remember and then perform during the fights.

Each of the characters does come with a unique special ability, and I’d make sure that everyone reads theirs out aloud at the start of the game so that people aren’t trying to read super small print on a card across the table in the midst of a real time game.

Here, players roll their dice in real time and try to get their combos filled up as quickly as possible.  It can be a bit of a frenzy as dice tend to fly all over the place.  Players can either try to focus on a single combo, rerolling as many dice as possible – or players can try to hedge their bets and work on multiple combos at once; thus having fewer dice to roll but possibly more faces that can continue a combo.  

As you only have 4 dice, regardless of which main strategy you choose to follow, you’ll likely find yourself with a single die in hand, rolling it over and over again, waiting for the right face to show up.  This felt exciting at first as all the players are anticipating getting that final die face – but over the course of the game (which is admittedly and thankfully not that long), it becomes more tedious than anything else. This action keeps going until someone completes a Combo – then everything pauses as the big white die is rolled and everyone sees the result of said Combo.  

The target of the combo isn’t decided until the big die is rolled, and this leads to my next issue with the game. Namely that it encourages dogpiling.  While it’s true that a player can have a defensive combo at the ready to deflect damage; once it’s used, that player is then vulnerable to be hit again and again.  Moral of the story:  Don’t be the first person to be hit and have no defense.

For me, it’s a bit frustrating that each of the offensive combos is worth the same – that is a random roll of the damage die.  I would have maybe liked to see some weaker and stronger combos that dealt differing amounts of damage (or multiple rolls of the damage die) to give some motivation to try different things.  In my two player games, this problem is eliminated, and as it stands, that player count is probably the only one which I would continue playing at.

Will this game replace Street Fighter?  No, of course not.  Does it emulate the excitement and fury of Street Fighter?  Well, not really either.  But the games are short, and if you need a frantic real-time dice chucker in between other games, this could fit the bill.  Or you could play a stimulating game of Wordle on your phone in the same amount of time.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4w2PLgM