Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2165 KP) rated The Secret of Dead Man's Mine in Books
Mar 9, 2018
Read my full review at <a href="http://carstairsconsiders.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-review-secret-of-dead-mans-mine-by.html">Carstairs Considers</a>.
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Purple Phoenix Games (2266 KP) rated Dicetopia in Tabletop Games
Jun 12, 2019
Welcome to the Dicetopia – a vast city teeming with opportunity. Some people capitalize on those opportunities for the greater good, but not you. You and your faction have more dubious motivations – you see a city ripe for the taking. Unfortunately for you, other factions in the city see the same thing. Now, you must work quickly and quietly to gain control over the city’s neighborhoods before your opponents! Pick up loot, carry out secret missions, and undermine your opponent in any way possible. The sneakiest and most clever faction will come out on top – will it be yours?
In Dicetopia, you are a member of a faction vying for control of the city. You and your opponents have secret missions to complete, and your strategy will vary depending on those missions. On your turn, you will swap one of the agents from your faction board with a die from any neighborhood. Each neighborhood has an action associated with it, and placing an agent there allows you to take the designated action. Neighborhood actions could be beneficial for you (re-rolling a die on your faction board), or they could be detrimental for your opponent (swapping one of their dice for one from the board). A controlling presence is one key to success, so make sure you have more agents than your opponent in any neighborhood! End-game scoring is in three parts: 1. Die total from your faction board, 2. Points for controlling a neighborhood, and 3. Successful completion of your secret missions. The player with the highest score wins!
Overall, I love Dicetopia. It’s kind of a game of worker placement without the weight that is sometimes associated with that mechanic. As someone who has not played many worker placement games before, I think Dicetopia does a good job introducing players to the mechanic. You place your agent, take the die, perform the corresponding action, and that’s your turn. Easy peasy. And since your secret missions dictate your strategy, the game is really more about dice/set collection than it is about worker placement. Another thing I like about the game is that it is dictated by dice, which means you’ll never play the same game twice. All of the dice are rolled and randomly placed during setup, so your city board will always be different for each game. And depending on your secret missions, the die values could make completing your secret missions easier or harder! That means you have to strategize your use of neighborhood actions even more! There is so much more strategy involved in this game than meets the eye, and I love that.
The one thing I do not like about Dicetopia is that whenever you place an agent in a neighborhood, you must take the corresponding action. Even if you don’t want to, or if it would be against your best interest. That gets a little frustrating as the game goes on, because some actions (later in the game) could essentially undo your entire game, costing you points by altering your success on secret missions. I wish the neighborhood actions were optional, because then it wouldn’t feel like my entire game strategy had been thrown out the window in the last couple of turns.
Besides my one grievance with the neighborhood actions, I really thoroughly enjoy playing Dicetopia. It was definitely a great find on Kickstarter for me, and I hope you’ll decide to give it a shot too! Purple Phoenix Games gives it a 9 / 12.
https://purplephoenixgames.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/dicetopia-review/