Kingdom of Dice
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 18
- 2 min read
Kingdom of Dice is a deceptively simple push-your-luck dice game from Mandoo Games. There's a solitaire mode but the competitive game is designed for 2-4 players and is played over three rounds. The game uses six six-sided dice: regular dice except that they show a crown symbol in place of the number 6.
There's a deck of 18 cards representing characters from the kingdom. There are cute illustrations from Apolline Étienne but what matters are the card values, which are in the range 1-10. For each round, six of these are drawn at random and laid out in descending order, adding at the top the Chancellor (12), Queen (12) or King (15), depending on the round.
Players each have four wooden crown tokens and they place these out on the board on the total they roll. The round ends when seven crowns have been placed out, with the cards allocated according to players' relative positions on the board.
The push-your-luck element comes in your dice rolling and the game's categorisation of a valid roll. To be valid, you must have at least one crown. You can only have one 5. To keep any of the other numbers you must have no fewer than the number on the dice; so four 4s, three 3s, two 2s, one 1. You can re-roll but you must set aside at least one die on each roll... If you have a valid roll, you place one of your crowns on the total of what you rolled: the addition of all the pips multiplied by the number of crowns you've rolled. If you end up with an invalid roll (for example, you've kept 4s but only end up with three of them), you don't get to place a crown anywhere on the board.
Tho' it's a simple game, prolific designer Reiner Knizia has made it suitably challenging through the dice rolling limitations and the scoring. Do you settle for a low valid roll that you know will at least score you something or do you push your luck in the hope of achieving a higher roll. And knowing what other players have rolled and where their crowns are on the board inevitably informs players' choices and provides the game's interaction but without the 'take that' element of other dice-rolling push-your-luck games like Bang! The Dice Game (DV Games).
If you're looking for a light, dice chucking push-your-luck filler, then you should definitely give Kingdom of Dice a roll out.
