Tagline: A really great card game, although with fewer twists than we’ve come to expect from Master Garfield.

THE CONCEPT

“’One day I will ride a horse like that,’ said the child to the woman as they watched the noble procession. ‘Yes dearie.’ ‘And I will have a palace, and lots of cake.’ ‘Maybe,’ she said, remembering the marble-lined halls of her youth. ‘But today let’s just to try to finish planting to the stream.’ The only place that peasant and princess change places faster than in a fairy tale is in The Great Dalmuti!”

Life isn’t fair… and neither is The Great Dalmuti!

According to the introduction of the little multi-lingual instruction pamphlet of The Great Dalmuti (English, Spanish, German, and French rules are all presented in one), Richard Garfield first encountered the rules for this game while attending graduate school. As he says: “I had never seen a game like it before; it rewarded the player in the lead and penalized the player who was falling behind. The game was played for no other purpose than to play. There was no winner or loser at the end; there was only the longest-lasting ‘Dalmuti’, and the ‘peon’, the player most talented at grovelling.”

THE RULES

There are twelve ranks of cards. The ranks symbolize various levels in a fantasy society – with the Great Dalmuti at Rank 1; the Baronesses at Rank 4; Peasants at Rank 12; etc. The rank also doubles as the card’s effectiveness (with lower numbers being more effective) and as the number of cards of that type in the deck (thus there is one Great Dalmuti in the deck, four Baronesses, twelve Peasants, and so on ). There are also two Jesters, who are assigned Rank 13 – but can also act as wild cards when played in conjunction with other cards.

At the beginning of the game everyone draws a random card, which assigns their rank: The player with the highest card is the Great Dalmuti; the second highest becomes the Lesser Dalmuti; the lowest becomes the Greater Peon; and the second lowest becomes the Lesser Peon. Everyone in between becomes a Merchant (of varying ranks depending on where their cards fell).

Here’s the really cute part of the game: You have to change the seating arrangment according to your rank. The Great Dalmuti can stay where he is, but everyone else needs to array themselves out to his right, until you finally return to the Greater Peon to the Great Dalmuti’s left.

All the cards are dealt at this point (by the Greater Peon) and the goal is simple: Get rid of all your cards. Before play begins, though, is a stage of taxation – in which the Greater Peon gives his best two cards to the Greater Dalmuti in exchange for two of his cards (which the Dalmuti selects), and the Lesser Peon gives one of his cards to the Lesser Dalmuti in exchange for one of his cards.

The Greater Dalmuti then leads the first round by playing one or more cards of the same rank. Play proceeds to his right (through the Lesser Dalmuti to the Greater Peon) with each player being able to play either more cards of the same rank which was last played, or a set of cards in a higher rank. The round proceeds until no one can (or will – you’re not forced to play just because you can), and then whoever played last wins the round and leads the next.

The first player to run out of cards becomes the Great Dalmuti in the next round; the second player out becomes the Lesser Dalmuti; and so on until you reach the last player (who becomes the Greater Peon).

There are some other flairs (for example the ability to call a Revolution and an optional scoring system), but that’s the gist of the game.

SUMMARY

You may be asking yourself why you should buy this game. After all, I’ve told you almost all the rules; Garfield didn’t invent it; and you can play it with a regular deck of cards.

Well, quite frankly, because the deck of cards which is being furnished to you is really great – and cheaper than buying the several decks of cards which you would need to in order to assemble the specialized deck needed to play.

Win-win.

Which, of course, leads to the obvious question: Is the game worth playing?

Absolutely. The bigger the group, the more fun it is. It’s open-ended, while remaining competitive, and the interactions (both socially and strategically) which the dynamics of the rules lead to are really entertaining.

Garfield says one thing in the instruction manual that really captures, I think, why he has had such incredible success in designing (and, in this case, presenting) card games that capture the minds and hearts of their players: “If you’ve enjoyed The Great Dalmuti and don’t usually play regular card games, give them a try. For me there are more hours of amusement in a single deck of cards than in all the world’s movies combined. And I love the movies.”

Amen.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Richard Garfield
Company/Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $7.95
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: 1-880992-57-4

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse is the first in a series of RPGs from Fantasy Flight Games, each featuring a different apocalyptic scenario: Zombies, Gods, Alien Invasion, Robot Revolt.

The primary conceit of End of the World is that you’re playing as yourself. The game’s default modus operandi is that you and your friends are sitting down to play an RPG when the apocalypse starts. At that point reality kind of bifurcates: The version of you playing the game stays at the table while the version of you in the game presumably leaves the table to go deal with the apocalypse.

If you’re an experienced gamer, the odds are pretty high that this concept immediately fills you with skepticism: There have been quite a few games that have tried the “play as yourself!” thing. It mostly doesn’t work very well, with the primary problem being people either painting themselves as paragons of virtue, becoming insulted when their fellow players dispute their self-assessments, or both.

End of the World, however, has a very clever method of steering around these problems.

Characters in the game are defined around three categories: Physical, Mental, and Social. Each category has two associated characteristics (Dexterity and Vitality in the Physical category, for example), features (either positive or negative) that affect task resolution, a stress track, and associated traumas.

Character creation basically consists of two steps: First, you get a pool of 16 points that you can use to model yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 in each of the six characteristics.

Second, the rest of the group secretly votes on each of your character’s categories: They can either agree with your assessment, vote that one of the characteristics should be higher, or vote that one of the characteristics should be lower.

The combination of the point buy system (which makes it clear that you’re just modeling a version of yourself, not trying to objectively measure some sort of fundamental truth) and the secret vote (which allows for anonymous tweaking while still giving you final control over exactly which characteristic in the category is adjusted) go a long way towards mitigating the common problems of playing yourself. But the clever twist is that the outcome of the vote also impacts your character’s positive and negative features: If the group decides one of your characteristics should be higher, then you gain a negative feature in that category. If they decide one of your characteristics should be lower, then you gain a positive feature in that category. This incentivizes you to be honest in your self-assessment and also rewards you if the group passes the harsh verdict that you’ve over-estimated your abilities. (It also lets you play the system a bit by, say, deliberately ranking yourself higher than you think you deserve in a category: Either you get a nice ego boost when people agree with you or you get the positive feature you were fishing for.)

The other nice thing about this system is that you can easily use it to create a character other than yourself. So the game pushes you in an interesting direction, but is flexible enough to really let you do whatever you want to with it.

Character creation is easily the game’s best feature.

SYSTEM

Task resolution in End of the World revolves around pools of positive and negative dice. (All the dice are six-sided.) You start with one positive die and you add additional dice for positive features, equipment, assistance, and situational benefits. Then you add negative dice based on the difficulty of the task, your negative features, the traumas you’re currently suffering from, and any situational hindrances.

Then you roll the pool. Each negative die result cancels out a matching positive die result. If you have any surviving positive dice that are equal to or less than the characteristic being tested, you succeed at the task. If you have any surviving negative dice, however, they inflict stress in the matching category.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to run away from a horde of zombies. You have Dexterity 3 and the positive feature of long-distance runner. You also have a twisted ankle from when you jumped out of a hayloft yesterday (that’s a trauma). The GM rules that the number of zombies involved in the pursuit makes escape more difficult, so he adds a negative die to the test. That gives you a pool of two positive dice (one base and one for long-distance runner) and two negative dice (one for your twisted ankle and one from the situation).

Let’s say you roll 3 and 2 on your positive dice. You also roll 5 and 2 on your negative dice. The negative 2 cancels out your positive 2, but you still have a positive 3 (which is equal to your Dexterity score) so you succeed. Because the negative 5 also survived, however, you suffer a point of stress even though you succeeded.

There are a couple of wrinkles to this: If you sustain a certain amount of stress, you suffer a trauma. The more stress you’re suffering from, on the other hand, the more difficult it is to sustain additional stress (as you become hardened to your circumstances). In combat, weapons will grant you additional dice and/or modify the amount of stress you inflict on a successful attack. Suffer enough stress in any category and you are either dead, insane, or catatonic.

But that’s basically it. Ultimately, this system is vapor-thin. It’s not bad, but it’s not particularly robust and it doesn’t really have anything unique to say. (It does have a weak focus on the concept of stress and trauma, but it’s less of a spotlight and more of a 20-watt bulb.)

The couple of places where it does occasionally try to offer more than the most basic support are, unfortunately, kind of laughable. For example, there’s a table of “common gear” which consists of thirteen items featuring descriptions like, “Water Bottle: Storing and transporting water.” Thank god they included that table; I never could have figured out what a water bottle might be used for without it.

(I’m not cherry-picking there, either. They’re all like that. “Flashlight: Spotting things in the dark.”)

The system will get the job done, but it’s not really a selling point for the game. Which means, at the end of the day, that End of the World is going to live or die on its scenarios.

SCENARIOS

Unfortunately, the scenarios are the biggest disappointment in the game.

End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse includes five different versions of the zombie apocalypse: In one version the zombies are the result of a meteor. In another they’re the result of disease. In another they’re purely supernatural. And so forth. The game covers the gamut of possibilities.

Elsewhere in the book, the designers recognize (although not in quite so many words) that any apocalyptic tale basically breaks down into five parts:

• Discovery that the world is coming to an end.
• Acquiring weapons and the means to defend yourself from immediate threats.
• Gather food and medicine and the other supplies necessary for mid-term survival.
• Establish a safe house to provide stability and defense for long-term survival.
• Find long-term safety by figuring out what permanent survival looks like in the new world order.

Where the game truly flirts with genius is in realizing that the specific manifestation of this five act structure depends heavily on the circumstances the players find themselves in and the decisions that they choose to make. So rather than trying to pre-bake a particular package of events, the scenarios in End of the World feature flexible, generic locations.

For example, the first scenario includes a Farm. It describes some of the useful features of the Farm and how those features are likely to be tied into the five part structure of apocalyptic survival (although once again, unfortunately, not in so many words or with so clear an understanding). It lists a half dozen or so events and encounters that could occur on the Farm.

What makes this potentially brilliant is that the GM can take this richly developed generic material and instantly contextualize it in response to the players. If one of the players says, “We need to get out of the city! My Aunt Patty has a farm north of the cities.” Then the GM can flip to the Farm and immediately figure out what happens there. If the players are later driving cross-country when their car breaks down and the GM says, “You can see a little farmhouse off on the horizon.” Alternatively, if the players decided to go to the Mall to gather supplies, then the GM can readily reach for a different location while contextualizing it to whatever local mall the players are familiar with.

I say this is potentially brilliant, however, because End of the World face-plants pretty hard on the actual execution.

The first problem is that it’s not clear that the designers fully understand the potential of the structure they’ve adopted. This leads to a lot of the material shying away from strong choices and instead coming across as mushy and less useful than it could be.

The bigger problem, however, is that there simply isn’t enough material. The first scenario, for example, contains just six locations (and one of them isn’t actually a location): Farm, Horde of Ghoul Rats, House, Mall, Hospital, and Sewers.

What End of the World needed was for each scenario to be fully developed so that, no matter where your players decide to head in your local community or surrounding countryside, you’d be able to flip open the book and find material for it. Instead, the material presented is so thin on the ground that I’m not really sure what the point of it is.

Where the approach becomes particularly ridiculous are the post-apocalyptic scenarios. End of the World also features five scenarios describing what the world is like after the apocalypse (with each of these being paired to one of the apocalypses). But these post-apocalypse scenarios only include three of the generic locations.

You can kinda get away with pointlessly describing six locations in the modern world because, well, it’s the modern world: We presumably already know our own communities. But these post-apocalyptic settings completely transform reality as we know it and then the designers pretend that giving you three unconnected locations qualifies as meaningful guidance for running a scenario there.

CONCLUSION

End of the World features a character creation system with a couple of clever ideas. It features a rule system that gets the job done.

But where it falls apart are the scenarios: In the decision to cover five apocalypses and five post-apocalypses (or possibly in the decision to limit the book to 144 pages), it’s really clear that End of the World has simply spread itself too thin to do any of its scenarios justice.

What makes this bitterly disappointing is that if any one of these scenarios had gotten the attention and the depth of support that it deserved, it would have almost certainly pushed End of the World into being a brilliant game.

Instead, it’s just kind of pointless.

Because the scenarios aren’t developed, they all boil down to, “There are zombies and they wreck shit.” If you’ve ever watched a single zombie movie, you’re not going to gain a single piece of useful information from this book. Meanwhile, the rule system is so simplistic that it, too, isn’t really adding anything to the experience.

What you have, basically, is a book that doesn’t actually do anything. There’s no value being added. Once you’ve read the title, you basically have everything the game is going to offer you.

Skip it.

Style: 4
Substance: 2

Author: Andrew Fischer
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Cost: $39.95
Page Count: 144
ISBN: 978-1-63344-055-5

Tagline: The best character sheets done for any game, ever. Period.

WHAT IS THIS?

This is a review of three associated products for Guardians of Order’s Sailor Moon Role-Playing Game (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere): The Knight Character Diary, the Dark Warrior Character Diary, and Sailor Scout Character Diary.

Essentially these are character sheets from a company that dreams really big (each 56 page pamphlet is for use with a single character). Each diary contains a 14-page character sheet, forty diary pages, a title page which you can personalize, and a dozen or so pictures (appropriate for each type of character) which you can use for your character portrait.

HOW GOOD IS IT?

Very, very good – surprisingly enough.

Personally, I don’t buy character sheets. The last time I bought a packet of character sheets was back in 6th grade, when I was an avid AD&D player and those of us in the group who could afford to splurge on store-bought character sheets (instead of writing it out on notebook paper) became possessed of a certain prestige.

In point of fact, I didn’t buy these – they came in the form of reviewer comp copies from GoO. But if I was playing in a Sailor Moon campaign I’d be sorely tempted to break my habit now that I’ve seen these.

For starters, the 14-page character sheet is absolutely wonderful. Often when you see extended character sheets like this all that’s really contained on them are lots of lines which are supposedly dedicated to “character history”. There are certain elements of that here (a page dedicated to it, but laid out rather nicely in segmented portions of your history – “Silver Millenium” and “Earth Childhood” in the Sailor Scout diary, for example), but by-and-large the extended sheet consists largely of closely targeted questions meant not only to spur your creativity, but also to facilitate ease of reference.

What this reminds me most of is another memory from my avid AD&D days (it’s nostalgia time). Back then I participated heavily on the FidoNet AD&D echo (like a Usenet newsgroup, but propagated at a much slower speed between individual BBS message boards). While there I happened to pick up something called the “Personal Code”, which was designed by a wonderful young woman named Alesia Chamness. It was a replacement for AD&D’s alignment system which encouraged the individual player to develop his character through a series of targeted questions. It was useful for defining your character in writing, for spurring creativity, and for developing your existing ideas. Really great stuff, and highly reminiscent of what you’re getting in this diaries.

The diary itself is done really nicely. The left-hand pages are plain white with a border which is evocative of the character type in question (a rose is in each corner of the border in the Knight Character Diary, for example). The facing pages, on the right side, takes advantage of the rich wealth of artwork which is available to GoO for this game line (in the form of animation stills) – the entire page is taken up by a grey-muted image (again, appropriate to the character type). Because they’re muted images you can easily write over these, and they end up providing a fantastic feel to the entire product. You’re not just buying a book of blank pages, you’re buying something that really ends up enhancing the recording of your character’s life and exploits.

Finally, the stock pictures at the end (which are designed to be xeroxed, cut out, colored, and pasted onto the title page which leads the book) are useful for the artistically-disinclined.

WHAT WOULD I CHANGE?

Not much. I’d probably drop the price down to $4.95, rather than $5.95. Crossing the $5 barrier to $6 makes these books seem just a little too pricey to me. On the other hand, I’m sure that GoO has priced these where they have because that’s where they can make a profit.

As for the actual content of the pieces, the only I’d change – or rather, expand – are the stock photos. I feel rather limited by the fact that the only picture they have are of the characters from the animated series itself. It’s really bad in the Knight Character Diary, because all you’re basically getting are a variety of pictures of Tuxedo Mask. Again, though, I don’t see any way for GoO to have done anything differently – they’re constrained by the artwork which is available to them.

IS IT WORTH IT?

If you’re the type who buys character sheets as a matter of course, then I would say definitely yes. The price may seem a little steep at first – but, trust me, you’re getting your money’s worth.

If you don’t typically buy character sheets, then there’s a goodly chance you aren’t going to break the habit with these. On the other hand, I’d suggest taking a peek at them next time you’re in the store. They just might surprise you.

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Author: Karen McLarney
Company/Publisher: Guardians of Order
Cost: $5.95
Page Count: 56
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

What I said about not buying character sheets was nothing but truth: When I first started roleplaying, I photocopied the sample sheet off the back of the BECMI basic manual (which produced the double-sided 8.5 x 11 character sheet 2-up on a single sheet) and got so used to using it that when I bought a pack of the official sheets they seemed weird to me. I don’t think I’ve ever actually paid for an official character sheet ever again.

Of course, in the digital era that doesn’t mean as much as it used to: Although I don’t buy them, I have used a variety of official sheets over the years. And a really great character sheet — like the Sailor Moon Character Diaries — really can transform a game. Most recently, the character sheets for Numenera and The Strange are like that: The former through sheer beauty and utility; the latter through the excessively clever method it uses for handling characters shifting between alternate realities.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: Two words: Bizarre. No wait, that’s only one word. Uhhh… Okay: Really bizarre. How’s that? Good? Good. Great. Okay.

CONCEPT

Government-Funded Robot Assassins from Hell – Mission One: Kill All Evil Game Designers (henceforth, for obvious reasons, referred to merely as Government-Funded Robot Assassins) is a card game dating back to 1995.

Basically it combines a tongue-in-cheek presentation of “government-funded robot assassins from hell” with a satiric look at the gaming industry. Hence you get cards like:

Steve Jackson. He has his own game company! Creator of gaming chaos, this man is wanted by not only the Pentagon, but also the Secret Service! KILL HIM NOW!

And:

Favorable Review. Everyone loves it! It could be because the game is good or maybe the designer slipped the reviewer some cold, hard cash.

(Note: Any game designers wishing to slip me cold hard cash should contact me via e-mail to obtain my snail mail address. I have no scruples. None at all. Honest.)

THE RULES

You win the game by earning a hundred points. Points are earned by carrying out a successful assassination – your targets being various game designers (each of whom are worth varying amounts).

Basically each player starts with a Plain Bot (a really basic model of robot assassin) and a hand of seven cards. You roll 4d6 to determine who plays first (why 4d6? I don’t know). Each player then draws a card and places a target on the table. Then he plays a card (which modifies the score of either his robot or a target, depending on the type of card). Everyone does the same thing.

When play returns to the first player he may now place a second card and then he needs to attack his target (the card he played back on his first turn). To carry out the assassination attempt he adds up his Assassinate score (his ‘bot plus its modifiers) and adds 4d6. If the total is higher than the defense of his target, then the target is dead and the player collects the points. Play out a new target.

Repeat until someone wins.

SUMMARY

I ended up picking up Government-Funded Robot Assassins because I was ordering a number of products from Propaganda Publishing and my eye caught the title (which is very catchy, you have to admit). Since it was only six bucks I added it to my figurative cart. I’m very disappointed by it.

Basically I would sum the game up by its major problems:

First, the production values are very low. Hand-scribbled lettering in the graphics, which are generally low quality anyway. The game as a whole shows up as a set of cardstock pages (the cards, which you have to cut up yourself) folded into a large sheet of xeroxed instructions. This isn’t too bad, overall, since the whole product is basically one large in-joke – so you’re hardly going to expect laminated perfection — but it’s still a knock.

Second, the game – by it’s very nature – ends up being very topical. And the topic is now half a decade old. To put that in perspective, realize that Magic: The Gathering was new, TSR was still independent, and SHADIS still existed. It’s not a knock against the game as it was originally conceived, but it is a knock against purchasing it today.

Third, the rules are presented in a rather sloppy manner in a couple of places. A far larger problem with the rules, however, is that they just aren’t that effective or fun. Your average assassination almost always succeeds, particularly once you start building your robot up (you can move your assassinate score up, but not down – while you are able to modify defensive scores in both directions).

Finally, the jokes were never that funny to begin with. I picked a couple of the more humorous ones, above, but most of them are just yawners. For example:

Wizards of the Coast. The publishers of a hot new card game. Though they have money, they aren’t exactly in the same league as TSR. If they survive Magic, look out!

(Okay, that’s a little funny now — in an ironic sort of way.)

At the end of the day, this just isn’t worth your time or your money. It has a note of pleasant nostalgia to it for “old timers”, like myself, who happened to be kicking around when the events discussed on these cards were unfolding. But that’s not reason enough to pick it up.

Style: 2
Substance: 2

Author: Philip J. Reed, Jr.
Company/Publisher: Propaganda Publishing
Cost: $6.00
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Tagline: “Have you ever wondered what your dice when you’re not using them?” You’re about to find out – whether you want to or not.

A couple of days ago an interesting e-mail cropped up in my mailbox: Seth Ben-Ezra, lead designer and publisher of Dark Omen Games, was inviting me to review their new game — Dice Wars — which was freely available from their website. Well, hell, who am I to say no to those who seek me out? Besides which he was groveling (no, really, he told me he was groveling), and I just hate to see that in a grown man. So I popped over and took a look.

CONCEPT

“Have you ever wondered what your dice when you’re not using them?” You’re about to find out – whether you want to or not.

Basically once you’ve got a taste for the game’s concept the rest will quickly become obvious: Your dice are alive. They form societal units based on their die sizes and types (“a black die probably won’t get along with a sparkly pink die, for what should be obvious reasons”). There’s a fairly well-developed and semi-extensive (given the short nature of the rules) section on die-type personalities: “The four-siders are the craziest of all dice…” “The d10s are the shock troops of dice wars. Many defenses have crumbled before formations of d10s…” “d8s, as a rule, suffer from an inferiority complex…” And so forth. My favorite is the section on “Monstrosities”: “Legend speaks of other dice. Dice that have been mutated beyond recognition. Old dice whisper stories of dice with 16 sides, 30 sides, and even 100 sides.”

Every so often, though, the dice are seized by “the Rage” – capable of sending an entire dice bag into a complete frenzy of violence.

That’s when you have…. Dice Wars!

THE RULES

The game consists of a set of rules (available in HTML, MS Word, and Acrobat) and a “Battlemap” (available as a set of GIF files and a PDF).

The game itself is scenario-based – you set the dice up for combat based on pre-designed scenarios. Many of the scenarios contain victory conditions. Unfortunately, this leads us to my first set of major critiques of the game.

First, there are only two scenarios include: “All Out War” and “Saving Private Ryan”. The former being a basic combat scenario, the other being a “rescue the captive die” scenario in which some special rules are presented for that. Just some basic, and fairly obvious, variants (“capture the flag”, “battle of the monstrosities”, etc.) leap to mind with ease. This wouldn’t be such a problem except for the fact that no coherent rules are given for the creation of new scenarios.

Second, the rules state: “Additionally, regardless of the scenario, one victory condition always applies. If you lose all of the dice that you assigned to the battlefield, you lose.” Personally, as many of you know, I like to keep as much flexibility as possible. When someone lays down a “thou shalt not” like this my first response is: “Oh yeah, what about situation X?” In which situation X would be a plausible scenario in which such a victory condition would not apply. For example, the capture of an enemy die as your victory condition – kill all the enemy and you lose. Keep your options open.

Third, I downloaded the PDF versions of the rules. Each scenario is supposed to be accompanied with a diagram of how to lay your dice out on the BattleMap – unfortunately this diagram is missing.

Moving on: Each scenario gives an army size for each side, which is then created from the forces in your dice bag. For example, in a 100-sided game you’d take a selection of dice which totaled 100-sides between (five d20s; one d20 and eight d10s; etc.). You then your “general staff” (a concept which is never explained) to determine initiative in placement – whoever wins places one of their dice, then the other, and so on until all dice are placed. Depending on the scenario you may then select a “Fearless Leader”, a die which has certain positive combat effects (but also causes you to lose initiative on the next turn if it ever dies).

To begin the actual game you again roll your “general staff” (still don’t know what it is) to determine “activation initiative”. The player who wins “activates” (an arcane wargame term which means “move”) one die – the fewer sides a die has, the farther it can move on a given term. Once a piece has been activated, you should place an activation counter under it so that you don’t accidentally move it again on this turn. Activation then alternates, just like placement.

Once all your dice have moved, combat takes place between any enemy groups which have found themselves in the same space. Basically it works like this: The “attacker” (a concept which is not clearly defined, but I assume means the person moving into a square which was occupied first by the other player) pair off dice into sub-grouping called melees – in other words, he pairs up some of his dice with the dice of the other player. For example, the attacker might pair his d10 up against the defender’s d6; his d20 and d6 up against the defender’s d10.

At this point you then roll each melee (adding multiple scores together) – whoever has the higher score wins, and the other dice are removed from play. (Note: At the end of a round there may still be dice from both sides left alive in the square. You stop after a single round of combat resolution.)

It shouldn’t take more than a couple seconds for you to start seeing the problems: While there are some rules limiting exactly how the attacker can distribute the dice (the player who has fewer dice has melee groups of only one die each, and the other player cannot have three dice in a melee group until all of his groups have two dice in them), this is still hugely unfair to the defender – who, actually, should logically be able to determine what formations his or her defenders are in.

The simplest fix for this unbalance is to simply give group assignation chores to whoever has more dice. Given the rules concerning even dice distribution this makes sense – since whoever has fewer dice will never have any choices about melee groups, anyway.

Or, for a slightly more complicated fix: If the space was occupied by a single player’s dice for a whole turn before being attacked by the other side (in other words, at least some of your dice have been standing in the space by themselves without any enemy dice present), then they get to set up whatever defensive groups they want (whether that’s one big group or lots of little groups is up to them. Then the attacker defines his attack groups (if you want to make defense a lot easier, you can let the standing defender have the ability to define lop-sided combat groups, while forcing the attacker to evenly distribute his forces – in order to represent that ability for the defender to prepare defenses, while the attacker is acting while on the move). If, on the other hand, both sides moved into the space for the first time on this turn (or are continuing a combat from a previous round in which this was true) then the rules of my simple fix (side with more dice defines evenly-distributed melee groups) apply.

To wrap things up, you can also have artillery units – which are placed in special spaces around the edges of the BattleMap. To fire artillery you roll all of the dice in the artillery pool, and then count the spaces directly in front of the artillery based on the number you roll. For example, if you rolled 1, 3, and 4 (on three artillery dice) you would count out 1, 3, and 4 spaces from your artillery – a single die is removed from every one of those spaces (whether friendly or not). There’s some additional rules on how to determine which side loses a die if the space contains troops of both sides.

SUMMARY

I’m not going to lie to you: There are quite a few problems here.

First off, the overall package suffers from an unprofessional lay-out and presentation. Details are missing, there are several broken links off of the web-pages, and the language used in the rulebook often descends into a far too casual voice (replete with unamusing attempts at humor).

Second, the rules are too cluttered (for lack of a better word). At its heart Dice Wars is a very simple, Cheapass-esque, game. But the rules often use terms which are better left to the realm of Advanced Squad Leader (“activation” being a key example). The failure to honor the KISS principle, in combo with some generally unclear language (much of which has been cleaned up in my short presentation of the rules above – particularly in the area of combat resolution), makes it so that you have to decipher the game in order to enjoy it.

Third, the rules simply aren’t flexible enough. Or, to be more precise, they aren’t as flexible as they easily could be.

Fourth, the BattleMap is too damn small – it’s useful for some squad-level stuff, but you just don’t have enough maneuverability. I’d suggest using a chessboard which is oversized enough to fit multiple dice into each square. It’ll be more fun and you won’t have to cut-and-paste.

Finally, and perhaps most damning, the rules don’t deliver on some of the neat concepts discussed in the promo material at the beginning of the game. I’d have especially liked to have seen more detailed rules on the Monstrosities, and for the “powers” of different types of dice (gems, solids, etc.).

But, at the end of the day: Should you check this one out? Well, if you were paying any significant amount of money (even at, say, a Cheapass level) for the package I’d say no. But it is a freebie. With some minor modifications and decipherment (most of which I’ve implied or done here in this review) the game becomes the simple, quick, fun playing experience I think it’s ultimately meant to be. In particular I’d highly recommend it for quick play while you’re waiting around for that perpetually late member of your gaming group to show up – you’ve already got the dice just sitting there, the rules are easy to remember, and the board is easy to improvise.

Style: 3
Substance: 2

Author: Seth and Crystal Ben-Ezra
Company/Publisher: Dark Omen Games
Cost: Free!
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/12

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