Shannon Appelcline: Dice Games, Part One: Mechanical Evolution

I’m going to be the first one to officially call it: 2008 is the Year of the Dice (at least in the slightly delayed American market).  I think To Court the King (2006) really got the current trend going, but since its release we’ve seen several notables including Kingsburg (2007), Airships (2007), and The Catan Dice Game (2007).  Going by other publications like Alhambra: The Dice Game (2006) and the forthcoming Ra: The Dice Game (2008?) I’m starting to think that every board game is going to have a dice game too.

Thus, I’ve decided to start a multi-part look at dice games. This week I’m going to concentrate on the mechanics by looking at how dice games have been played over the last several decades and how those general mechanics have evolved over time. Then in future articles I’m going to look at how to control the randomness of dice and I’m going to review several of the most notable games.

As a final tease for this week’s article, let me say that if you keep on reading, there’s a neat diagram toward the end.

Evolving Dice Mechanics

Broadly, dice could be part of any game.  They act as a randomizing element in any number of war games and randomly affect production in German-classic The Settlers of Catan. I’m sure 100 other games use them in 100 other ways. However when looking at dice mechanics this week I want to move beyond those games where dice are a part of the design to those games where dice are the core of the game. Granted, the game could still have other emphasis. Liars Dice is really a bluffing game, Kingsburg is broadly a resource-management game, and Wicked Witches Way is actually a memory game. Still, the dice are a critically important element in each.

For these dice-centric games, I believe there are four major mechanics: number matching, number maxing, pattern matching, and set creation--each of which I intend to give some attention in this article. As part of this evolutionary discussion I’ve identified some of the most notable games that feature these mechanics below. They may not always be the first games that showed them off, but they’re the games that I believe helped to keep the mechanics in the public eye and thus in the designer’s toolbox.

Number Matching is, I suspect, the oldest pure dice mechanic. It looks to me like it evolved from other games that used dice as an element. Consider a game of Backgammon, where rolling a “6” or an “8” might land you on enemy pieces, but rolling a “7” could put you in a vulnerable position. Abstract out the dice mechanics and remove the board, and you have Craps, a game which may date back to the Crusades.

Of course just rolling dice to hit certain target numbers isn’t that interesting (nor does it allow for any skill), and thus it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of sub-mechanics have been introduced specifically to make number matching games more interesting.

Can’t Stop is a pretty innovative game in the genre. For one thing, it introduced the idea of multiple dice combos. It let you roll four dice, then make two sets of two, thus producing a larger set of possible numbers that you could match. Recent release Kingsburg offers an interesting variant of this mechanic: you roll 3 dice, then can use them in any combination: three singletons, a singleton and a pair, or all three dice together.

Can’t Stop also introduced the can’t stop sub-mechanic, a mechanism that really highlights the very visceral enjoyment that you can derive from dice play. It allows you to keep rolling, but if you don’t come up with the right numbers, you lose everything! Pickomino is another recent release which uses this same idea.

Pickomino itself highlighted another innovation to the number matching genre: bigger is better. It suggests the general principal that if you roll higher values your result is more valuable, thus pushing the number matching mechanic toward a variant that I call number maxing.

Number Maxing generally suggests that rather than going for a specific value you’re instead shooting for a specific number or higher. It’s been pretty widely used in roleplaying games since at least the 1980s. There it tends to be called a “dice + skill” system or a “target number” system. However it’s much rarer in strategy games, and I think that’s primarily because it’s even more limited than number matching: there just isn’t a lot of strategy in rolling high.

One of the few strategy games that uses the mechanic is the brand-new Airships. You’ll note that it doesn’t make the number maxing the core of its game: instead managing cards and correctly measuring your risk are the heart of game play.

Pattern Matching is a much more common dicing mechanic, and perhaps the one that people think of most when they think of dice games. It’s what I tend to think of as the Yahtzee mechanism. You roll dice and you try and fill in certain patterns that are defined by the game system.

There’s been a flurry of these games over the last few years, among them To Court the King, Easy Come, Easy Go, and the Catan Dice Game. The core mechanic is strong enough that you don’t have to expand upon it in the way that you have to in the number matching genre. Nonetheless, a few of the newer pattern matching games do include some complementary mechanics that go beyond dice, which I’ll get to shortly.

Set Creation is my last major category of dice games. Just as number maxing was a somewhat varied subset of number matching, set creation is a somewhat varied subset of pattern matching. The basic idea of a set creation dice game is to create large sets of a certain die face. This is more or less the core mechanic of Liar’s Dice, but that game is more about bluffing than dice. It’s easier to see in the Alhambra Dice Game where you’re trying to collect majorities of the various building types through dice rolls.

Like number maxing, I think it’s pretty hard to build an entire game around set creation and have it be very interesting, and thus our two exemplar games have a heavy basis in non-dicing mechanics.

Evolving Non-Dice Mechanics

I’ve mentioned non-dicing mechanics a few times, so let me clarify that a bit with a definition: I’m talking about those mechanics that aren’t about the dice and how you roll them. More broadly they’re the sorts of mechanics that you could find in games of any sort. Thus of our two set creation games, Liar’s Dice has strong bluffing mechanics and Alhambra Dice Game has strong majority-control mechanics.

Among the games I’ve been talking about in this article, two other non-dicing mechanics are more common place.

Theft shows up in both Easy Come, Easy Go and Pickomino, which are both Reiner Knizia games as it happens. You can win something with dice rolls, then lose it to something else. Shared mechanics among Knizia games really aren’t that much of a surprise, though it makes me wonder if the two games were developed around the same time.

Meanwhile a mechanic that I call “roles or actions” shows up in three of the recent dice games, To Court the King, Kingsburg, and Airships. In each of these games you can win special powers with your dice rolls, then use those powers to advance yourself in the game. In To Court the King and Airships your special powers let you roll better, while in Kingsburg it’s the entry point to the resource-management system. Role-based action systems have become very (very!) common in board games in the last few years, but I do wonder if To Court the King was an influence on Airships.

And that pretty much finishes my look at the core mechanics of dice games. As promised, here’s a chart to finish things off. It graphically depicts the families of games that I’ve been discussing, along with listings of notable dice mechanics and non-dice mechanics.

(And as a final note: thanks to Eric V. who suggested this topic a few weeks ago when Airships hit the table for the first time.)

Around the Corner

Last week I returned to my Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities column with an article on Collective Choice: Ratings Inputs and Outputs, which is a bit further removed from gaming than most of my online writing, but which is of some interest, since it talks about how people come together to make choices.

I’ve also recently written reviews of Chopstick Dexterity Megachallenge 3000 and the Catan Dice Game as well as a comic book called Caliber: First Canon of Justice.

I’ll be back in two weeks to talk more about the mechanics of dice games.

© 2008 Shannon Appelcline

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Interesting article. And there’s more to come. In Europe already released: Drachenwurf, Burgenland & Shanghaien. Posted by Olav Fakkeldij on May 1, 2008 at 02:52 AM | #

"I’m going to be the first one to officially call it: 2008 is the Year of the Dice” Too late!  :-) http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/larry_levy_gathering_memoriestrends/ Great minds, and all that. Posted by Larry Levy on May 1, 2008 at 08:51 AM | #

Dice have also been used as playing pieces (beyond using them only as randomizers) since at least the late 1970s. Duell (1976) is the first such game that I remember, but there have been others, including Chase (1986) and Cephalopod (2006). James Ernest also invented new uses for dice with Button Men (1999) and Dogfight (2000, what later grew to become Diceland: Deep White Sea (2002) and its later expansions). Tumblin Dice (2004) is another example of dice used in an innovative way. Posted by Clark Rodeffer on May 1, 2008 at 09:30 AM | #

Too late!  :-) I’ll take cold comfort from the fact that I starting thinking about this article 3 or 4 weeks ago, the day Airships was released. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on May 1, 2008 at 11:16 AM | #

I recommend Knizia’s book, Dice Games Properly Explained, for a nice history of classic dice games, as well as a description the various families of games. He refers to Yahtzee and it’s antecedents/descendants as “Category” dice games, which I think is a more appropriate name then “pattern matching”. You’re not really trying to match patterns, you’re trying to get the best score by scoring in various categories - ones, twos, sixes, etc. The key, obviously, is to focus on high-scoring categories (sixes) while using low-scoring ones (ones) as dumping grounds. So the game really is about the categories, not about matching patterns per se. In this sense, To Court the King is not really in the same genre as Yahtzee, while the Settlers Dice Game is, although Settlers is clever because the categories themselves essentially morph and develop all game, and because the risk management is more interesting because the categories are less exclusive (in Yahtzee, if you’re rolling for 6s, you can’t fall back on 5s if that doesn’t work out - you basically just have to absorb a dump slot like ones, twos, or anything - while in Settlers you can hedge your bets for a Knight if you’re rolling for a Settlement or Road). While Yahtzee is much derided, it’s actually a fairly interesting game if you can play solo online or on a handheld, where games can be played quickly. There are interesting risk management decisions which are frequently non-obvious. I wonder if Airships is really a true dice game? In some sense it’s no more a dice game than any wargame that uses dice for its combat resolution. Based on your infrastructure and your goal you have a chance of success, and you just roll the dice and see if you make it. The different dice and whatnot provide interesting ways for you to tweak the probabilities, and also do a nice job of obscuring what exactly the chances are to (potentially, at least) reduce AP, but the dice are not really a central focus like they are in To Court the King or the Settlers Dice Game. Posted by Chris Farrell on May 1, 2008 at 11:49 AM | #

Nice article, Shannon--I look forward to the rest of the series. I think Pickomino (released as Heckmeck Am Bratwurmeck in 2005) really seemed to get people interested in dice games again.  Easy Come, Easy Go came out a year earlier and Michael Schacht’s Knights (2000) has a few similarities with To Court the King.  But it seemed as if Heckmeck (which got pretty wide play after it came out early in ‘05, even before the RGG version hit the States) seemed to trigger the explosion, which was confirmed when To Court the King came out the next year. By the way, I remember reading a description of a Seyfarth prototype that eventually became Airships (it had a very different theme then) that predated To Court the King.  You never know what will affect the development of a game, but it seems as if Seyfarth at least had the basic ideas of a dice game in place before the Lehmann game reached the public.  I think Tom’s original game dates back to at least 2000 or earlier (he designed it as a wedding present for some friends). And, of course, Knizia described a bunch of clever original dice games in his Dice Games Explained Properly, as Chris mentions.  It’s THE essential book on dice games--no gamer should be without it.  All of which shows, there really is nothing new under the sun; just what publishers think will sell! Posted by Larry Levy on May 1, 2008 at 12:56 PM | #

The only game that I think _To Court the King_ *might* have directly affected is Kingsburg, mainly due to their heavy emphasis on roles. _Airships_ is clearly a pretty unique game, as I think its spot on the chart shows. I think To Court the King’s main influence was to get publishers excited about putting out dice games, though it could have been _Pickomino_ instead, as you suggest. Posted by Shannon Appelcline on May 1, 2008 at 02:12 PM | #

"Cosmic Wimpout” (1975) predates “Can’t Stop” (1980) in the genre of what you call “can’t stop” risk-based dice games.  “Can’t Stop” is a far more sophisticated execution of the idea.  I’d bet that Sid Sackson saw Cosmic Wimpout, realized it had a mechanic that was the germ of a good game, and turned it into a richer game. Posted by Jonathan Degann on May 2, 2008 at 11:12 AM | #

I’d take that bet, Jonathan, but only because: 1) Sackson was a very talented dude; 2) His designs from A Gamut of Games show he had an interest in dice games up to a decade earlier; 3) The occasional long lead time between design and publication; and 4) Cosmic Wimpout is just a commercial version of a much older, but almost identical set of games.  They go back to at least 1900 and probably much earlier than that.  Sackson was a student of the history of games and there’s a very good chance that he knew of these earlier dice games.  So he may have gotten his inspiration from elsewhere, but it didn’t have to had come from Wimpout! Posted by Larry Levy on May 2, 2008 at 01:20 PM | #

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