Dragon Dice

[quarrel]

TSR originally made Dragon Dice back in 1995, in the midst of a collectible-things-that-aren’t-cards-game wave that followed in the wake of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast acquired the game when they bought TSR, then later, on the verge of discontinuing the game, sold the license and backstock to a tiny company in Evanston, IL which has kept it alive ever since. I played a demo of it at PAX and finally decided to pick up a starter box — if nothing else, it’s one more game to look at in my Quixotic quest to find the perfect dice game.

The game makes heavy use of — you guessed it — custom-printed dice. Dice of various sizes and sides represent military units and their magic items. Depending on the custom symbols marking its faces, each die might generate points for manipulating Terrains, causing melee damage, causing ranged damage, preventing incoming damage, or casting spells. The symbol mix varies from die to die. Designing your armies to have specific mixes and using them to maximum situational benefit is the core of the game.

The object is to either eliminate your opponent or capture two of the three Terrains. Each Terrain has a state that determines which attack action can be used by armies there. An army can try to change its Terrain’s state, either to make a new action available for its own use or to deny the old action to the opponent (or both). Changing a Terrain all the way to its final state also captures it. Players distribute their units among the Terrains in any arrangement during setup, and can move them more or less freely during the game.

The Good

The good points are few but strong.

The game is about rolling lots of dice. Brilliant!

The core mechanics are elegant. Plenty of dynamic decisions naturally arise from Terrain adjustments and army movements. Should you focus all your Maneuver-heavy units on a location to keep control of it, or would it be wiser to mix in some heavy armor, thus sacrificing some Maneuver potential for more damage Saves? Should you work a Terrain toward its final state to capture it or leave it on an intermediate value so your archers can keep shooting from it? Should you pull more units into your reserves to cast stronger defensive spells, or will that leave your front lines so thin that your opponent walks right over them?

The Bad

The iconography is confusing. Not only does each race have their own symbols for standard results, but some races have multiple symbols for the same thing. For example, Undead cavalry show a horseshoe for Maneuvers, but Undead infantry use a bony human footprint. Also, on some die faces, each icon is worth one point of whatever it stands for, while others have a single icon worth a number of points equal to the die’s value.

It’s a collectible game. Playing with the contents of a single starter kit is like playing sealed Magic theme decks: it’s okay for scratching the surface, but the full depth of the game requires owning multiples of everything and lots of experimentation.

Lots of funky promo dice with special rules have been produced & discontinued over the years.

There are no explicit and few implicit restrictions on mixing different races in your army, leading to a lot of patchwork min-maxing. Imagine how much more “customizable” Magic decks would be if you could use any color mana for anything. It’s a little like that. (Hint: That’s not an improvement.)

Some dice colors are confusing. Many dice are two colors speckled together. It is difficult to tell whether dice are blue/green, blue/yellow, or green/yellow, especially if you don’t look at them side by side. The fact that different shades of plastic have been used in different production runs over the years makes things worse.

The rules are often imprecise and unintuitive. The game’s new stewards have spent a lot of effort balancing the game and collecting accumulated rulings, but little on fundamental rewordings or systemic redesign. For example, summoned dragons will fight each other instead of your armies if there are more than one and they’re different colors. But other than their breath, which they have only a 1/12 chance of using, all dragon attacks are worded to apply against armies only. Read strictly, the rules say that most of the time dragons just have harmless slapfights with each other. The interactions of multiple modifiers are likewise a mess of patchwork rulings and balance kludges. Let’s say you’re playing Coral Elves, who can count Maneuvers as extra Saves. A spell that doubles your Maneuvers can produce more Saves for you, but a spell that gives you +5 Maneuvers won’t. That’s because you process all multiplications first, then all racial powers, then all additions.