Hello everybody,
I found large quantities of blank, unpainted dice lately and thought about turning them into a playable game. This brought up the question if customizable dice games are really dead nowadays? Do you remember the old game like Dragon Dice, Star Trek, Chaos Progenitus, Dice Master or Marvel Super Dice? Despite a loyal fan base theese games all went the way of the Dodo. But does this mean the genre is dead?
The new Quarriors is a good example that dice heavy games still exist and are marketable. But this game is not quite what i am thinking about. My vision is a traditional game (like Dragon Dice) that is centered around dice with custom symbols on it, requires large amounts of them and involves a lot of dice rolling. Additional components like cards and reference sheets are only the side dish, not the main course.
Of course, i hear you say: Dice games are too luck based! It feels like "the game is playing you"! All you do is roll! But wait: Is that really true? Of course, dice games are heavy luck based games. But isn't there a way to make gameplay more interesting by adding appealing rules, a gameboard and maybe some cards?
Maybe we should see the dice rolling factor in theese games more like a flow of randomness the players have to control and use to their liking. Game Designers could provide ways to split the dice rolls just by providing non-random options to the players: For example assume a player has 3 piles of dice, each pile geared towards a different strategy. Just by letting the player decide wich pile to roll in wich situation gives the player the feeling "to be in control" back again. built up on this mechanic, randomnes could be split up and divided to make it less "omnipotent". See this just as an idea how to take a bit of wind out of the sails of the "its all random" ship.
Now, to give you a practical example: i thought about creating an outline for a customizable dice game (avoiding the term "collectible") similar to the good old Dragon Dice (wich was basically a fantasy wargame). The thing about miniature wargames is the near impossible production of high quality figurines - and this where the dice fit in perfectly. Its much easier to produce dice in large quantities and use them (printed in nice colors and with medieval symbols on them) to represent vast armies. And vast is to be taken literally here: How difficult is it to buy, build, paint and maintain a 50 metal-miniature army compared to collecting 50 nicely designed dice? Of course this is just one example of many games, and i dont say i want to produce such a game. This is just a theoretical discusssion.
Finally, of course we could say: lets use standard d6 and look up the results on a table. But is this really the same compared to nicely crafted, chunky rune dice with a texture and fine symbols on it? All sitting there on the table - in various colors, different sizes and the typical shapes?
Think about it and answer if you have something to say. I would certainly be interested!
Don't let the Dodo die (again)!
@truekid games : Yes i know SFR quite well. Maybe my post was not well written regarding that point. But DD is from the dice game's glorius past - so it fits quite well into the topic of my post i think.