Dice Miner
Designed by: Joshua DeBonis,Nikola Risteski
In Dice Miner, players take turns ‘mining’ dice from a (cardboard) mountain and adding them to their collection. The dice score – or activate – in different ways, and the goal is to collect the most points over three rounds.
At the start of the game the mountain is filled with dice from a bag (no choosing!) then players – representing mountain dwarves, if you want to embrace the theme – take turns mining/claiming them. On your turn you can only take a die from the top of the mountain – when it’s accessible without moving any dice above it. Two types of dice score: the white dice will score a point per pip on the dice faces in each run (-but a run must begin with a ‘1’ die!) and the yellow ‘gem’ dice will score their face value, with a bonus for whomever has the most.
The other dice don’t score but have a tactical value. Blue dice give you rerolls at the end of the round (when the mountain is empty), allowing you to try improve your score. Black dice – representing the mountain dangers of rockfalls and dragons – score minus points, unless you have a green die that turns those minus points into positives (shovel for rockfalls, sword for dragons). Finally the other face of the green die allows you to keep x number of dice on their current face for the next round – everything else gets rerolled before the mountain is filled again!
One face one each die shows beer. These can be very powerful in that spending a beer die on your turn allows you to take two dice instead of one, and dig them out from underneath other dice in the mountain, ignoring the from-the-top rule. When you use beer this way, you gift the beer die to another player of your choice, who immediately rolls it and adds it to their collection – potentially helping them.
The player in last place will start the next round, and after three rounds the game ends and most points wins.
Sam says
If Dice Miner is a bit mechanical, it’s still a fun enough undertaking for the half-hour it takes. The mountain itself has a kind of passive interaction in that when you take a die, you need to be mindful of what options you’re opening up for the next player. And the addition of the beer adds a element of surprise in what might otherwise be a slightly flat collecting-of-dice activity. I don’t adore it, but I’d happily play it again.
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Take That!
There’s room for some mild interaction here of the sneaky type, but not really enough to think of Dice Miner as a combative game. Nobody can steal your dice or remove your points.
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Fidget Factor!
It really depends how much players want to scrutinise the mountain and the ramifications of what they take. But we’ve played it as a pretty fast-moving thing with very few pauses.
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Brain Burn!
The rules are simple: take the best dice! But Dice Miner obfuscates what that option might really be with the both the mountain and the beer.
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Again Again!
The mountain fills randomly and the dynamics of those patterns plus what the players take and what they re-roll mean the game is never ‘solved’.
