So Darius posted this really interesting game called Dice Wars (he originally apparently got it from Zen of Design… some how I missed that post?). I’ve been playing it off and on for the better part of yesterday and today, and I’ve decided that I want to know what makes this game so addictive and (more importantly) fun.

In terms of the replayability aspect, I think my personal replayabiltiy theory holds true: every time you play this game, whether you win or loose, you have this feeling that it could have gone very differently, based mostly on your decisions. There’s a feeling of agency, which makes the game replayable. Another way to think about it, is that there is a great deal of strategy; strategy that affects the gameplay.

But there’s a lot of randomness to the game as well. The dice rolls and the distribution of gained dice at the end offer randomness that serves as dramatic tension and risk. I’ve often fought against people that say randomness offers these things, because they use such horrible examples. The common example is along the lines of 1 in 5 chests will blow up on you, and that will make every chest opening a dramatic event. I don’t believe this to be true. It simply becomes an annoyance that is completely balanced out by a simple risk reward question.

Take Diablo 2 as an example. Every so often, a barrel explodes. On easy levels, this means a loss of very little health, with the opportunity of great reward. On harder levels, the opposite is true. So it stands to reason that on an easy level, you’ll spend time opening barrels, regardless of the consequences, and on the harder level you won’t. The exploding barrel becomes an annoyance, not a dramatic event.

In Dice Wars, however, there the randomness plays into the overall strategy, and the risk/reward translates not into a single dramatic event, but into the drama of the game as a whole. You may accept more risk in a single move because of greater perceived reward, but also because you know that you have a fallback in your larger strategy. On top of this, the randomness allows the game to shift very quickly out of your favor, even with what you perceive to be as a great troop alignment. Dice Wars itself sways back and forth in tension until there is one very obvious winner, and even then small changes in luck can seriously deter a quick win.

There’s also another concept that I think make this game really interesting, and that I think hasn’t been talked about in this particular circle yet: game stages. Though this game is continuous, there’s definitely at least two different stages of the game: the early game and the end game. In the early game, you want to capture as much contiguous land as possible to build dice counts, and get yourself in a position where you can “easily” defend a border, allowing a corner to build 8 dice. In the end game, you want to make sure you hold on to the land you have, while keeping your 8 dice lands in play.

The point is that the strategy of the game changes part way through, and in order to win, you need to play a good early and end game; playing either badly will result in a loss. This is a pattern I’ve seen very frequently in the board games I’ve been playing recently. In the good ones, there is no one “dominant” strategy to win the game with. You need to shift strategies at least once in order to win, and you need to understand how to prepare for each section of the game in order to be able to shift strategies halfway though. It’s interesting, and I wonder if there are many digital games that actually take advantage of that.

There are, of course, problems in Dice Wars, the biggest, I think, is the fact that the last person to move in the first round is always a huge disadvantage, no matter what board is selected. I’ve actually seen computer players (and myself) wiped out before they get a chance to move. It’s a problem, especially in larger player games, but generally it’s great and I totally recommend playing it. See if you have the same analysis I do, and let me know if you discover anything else about this relatively simple, yet startlingly complex game.