Designed by: Yusuke Matsumoto
Nokosu Dice is actually more a card game, although there are dice involved. A trick-taker not too far removed from contract whist, Nokosu Dice mixes in some twists and turns that make it kinda bonkers, but also very canny indeed.
The cards are in several suits, numbered from zero up to seven. Before play begins, everyone will be adding dice to their ‘hand’ – the dice match the suit colours and function as extra cards – albeit unlike your cards, their values are out in the open for everyone to see. After the cards are dealt, everyone will be adding several dice to their own pool until only a single die remains: this die determines the trump suit and the trump number for all the cards in this round. For example, if the leftover die is a green three, all threes are trump and all green cards are trump – and a green three is a supertrump, that beats everything!
The game then plays out as a standard trick-taker: one player leads, everyone else must follow suit if they can. If you can’t, you can play anything. Everyone can play either a card or one of their dice – with one critical exception. The last die you have left when the others have been played becomes your bid for how many tricks you’ll win! When all cards and non-bid dice have been played, everyone scores a point for each trick they won, plus a bonus if they hit their bid (you can also bid zero, but must do so before trick-taking starts). After three or four rounds (for three or four players) the player with the most points wins.
Not currently available in the UK
As high, but as abstracted, as pretty much any trick-taking game where you bid. It may be in the other player's power - and certainly in their interest! - to force you to win too many tricks. Or not enough - even better!
Fairly low. Although Nokosu Dice is one of the weirdest trick-takers we've encountered in terms of bidding, the basic rules of following suit are the same.
The catch is that you don't want to spend the die that you need for your bid. The catch to that is you can't be sure which die you truly want to use for your bid, until it's possibly too late. This is the critical decision at the heart of each round.
If you like trick-takers, this is one of the maddest and best
3-4
Players
10+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
Like any trick-taking game, if you're looking for setting or theme, it's pretty thin on the ground. But if you like what trick-takers do in using a deck of cards (and dice, in this case) to present you with tricksy decisions in a relatively short game time, then Nokosu Dice - one of many intriguing designs coming out of Japan - is a favourite. In one way it's simple: dice are just extra cards, and whatever one you don't use as a card will be your bid for tricks. But judging which die to keep (or try to keep!) and when to take the plunge on that decision is the critical nub of the game. Bonuses are awarded depending on how many players did or didn't meet their bids as well, so hitting your bid when no-one else did is more valuable than doing so when everyone does so. It's rather lushly presented, in our opinion, and for all it's deranged opacity, really fun for those who like this kind of thing.