Designed by: John D. Clair
Cubitos is a racing game where the central dynamic is pushing your luck – will you streak ahead to a win, or fall flat on your face?
The smallish boards offer four different racetracks – you’ll use just one of them to play the game. Everyone has a runner piece at the start of the race, and on their own player board (with the sections DRAW, ROLL, ACTIVE, DISCARD on them) begin with seven grey and two black dice in the DRAW area. In essence, your dice are used for two things: pushing your runner along the track, and/or buying better dice!
On your first game you may want to take turns rolling, but once you’re up to speed you can have everyone rolling their dice simultaneously, and then applying the results in turn order. The default number of dice you can roll is nine (though that may change!) so at the start you’re rolling all of your dice. Any positive results go into your ACTIVE area, and you can keep re-rolling as long as you like – but! once you have at least three active dice, if you roll all blanks (very likely with those rubbish greys!) you go bust. We’ll come back to busting in a bit.
Let’s assume for sake of example, you stop on four positive results. You can leave all your dice that rolled blank in the ROLL area ready for your next turn, or optionally move them to the DISCARD area. Then, in turn order, everyone activates their dice: feet symbols move you one space along the track, and numbers are cash, which can be used to buy more – better! – dice. Every game has no less than eight different dice you can buy, and they’re almost without exception an improvement on the rubbish you start with. Money on dice can’t be saved for future turns, either. Any new dice go into your DISCARD, and your turn is over. If you busted, any active dice you were saving move into the discards and you won’t spend dice this turn – but! you get to move up the fan track instead, which brings it’s own -admittedly less alluring- rewards: increasing your draw-dice limit, or giving you cash that you can save from turn to turn. If on your turn you can’t gather nine dice into your ROLL area with whatever was there plus the DRAW area, then all of your discarded dice now shuffle back to your DRAW area.
Where Cubitos comes alive is the acquisition of dice. The opening three or four turns can feel a little rote, but when your better dice start getting involved, you’re moving further on the track, buying more dice, and going bust a lot less as well! The tracks play a part in the race as well. Stopping on certain areas gets you cash, or moves you up the fan track, or offers you a short cut if you have the cash to presumably bribe the racing officials!
And as well as the varied tracks, Cubitos also offers variety in what the dice do. For each of the eight ‘advanced’ colours, there are seven different powers the dice could have – you can choose your preference, or deal them randomly. As the race hots up, the runners get faster and faster but timing is key here too – spend all your good dice in one turn and your next turn may be a real duffer, as you only move your discarded dice back to the DRAW area when the dice there run out. As soon as any one player crosses the finish line, the game ends at the end of the round – if more than one runner made it over the line, the runner who travelled the furthest distance past it wins.
There's actually very little direct interaction between the players. Spots on the track can be shared (runners simply stack up) and nobody can be bumped or stolen from.
If you're playing with the simpler cards, the down-time in Cubitos is really very low. Everyone rolls at the same time and resolving the dice (in turn order) moves very fast.
The nub of it is improve your dice versus run the race. But there's also managing your hand - put all your good dice into a killer move and suffer through a consecutive damp squib of a round, or balance things out turn by turn?
Lots of inbuilt variety here - although it's always a race, Cubitos has gone to great lengths to mix things up with the various tracks and how the dice can function differently game by game.
2-4
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
A fun game, not entirely dissimilar to the luck-pushing of The Quacks of Quedlinburg but here, rather than drawing potions from a bag and hoping your cauldron doesn't explode, you're rolling dice and hoping you don't bust. Quacks is more elegant, perhaps, but for nothing other than the love of chucking dice - the tactile element, the action of rolling and hoping - I perhaps prefer Cubitos. If I've a criticism it can occasionally feel a little fiddly, especially with the red dice involve the comparing of who has most of them. When that happens the everyone-rolls-at-the-same-time idea feels compromised as players will want to see who is rolling what before deciding what dice they should select. But it's a minor niggle that doesn't stop Cubitos from being a fun, and funny, experience.