Puru Puru Paradice
- Board's Eye View
- Apr 16
- 2 min read
Daryl Chow's Puru Puru Paradice is a super-light family-friendly dice rolling game where players are racing to be the first to advance their Love or Excitement to 20. The game uses six cute-looking custom six-sided dice where two faces advance Love and two faces advance Excitement. The two other die faces reduce your 'jelly cube' marker from its 20 point starting position, and the game also ends if any player's jelly cube is reduced to zero on its track.
The USP for Puru Puru Paradice is the way in which the dice rolls are allocated. If there's a majority dice face (eg: four of the dice show the Love icons), then it's your neighbouring players (those to your immediate left and right) that take the benefit and you just take the effects of the remaining dice. Tied majorities don't count for this purpose, so the optimal roll would therefore be three Love and three Excitement.
You're not solely dependent on the vagaries of Lady Luck. You can take one free re-roll of any number of dice (ie: you decide which of the dice to keep and re-roll the rest) and you can re-roll for a second time by sacrificing one point on your jelly cube track.
As in other dice rolling games, including the classic Bang! The Dice Game (DV Games), the excitement flows from the decision space over when to accept a roll and when to push your luck and risk a re-roll. And of course the passing on of majority rolls to neighbouring players can be used as a 'take that' mechanic; tho' Daryl's design has tempered this prospect by giving two different jelly cube die faces - both have the same effect but they count separately for the purpose of reckoning majorities.
There's more too. You can move on from the basic game to play with unique abilities for each player. These shake things up a bit because in most cases they give players something extra to aim for in re-rolls. The specific abilities are shown on each player board as a formula, some of which seem unduly complicated or opaque, but they are actually fairly straightforward and are clearly explained in the rules sheet.
Puru Puru Paradice is attractively produced by Origame. There are solitaire rules but the game takes up to five players. Because of the adjacency rules the basic game plays particularly quickly as a three-player game; our three-player plays at Board's Eye View mostly came in at only a little over 10 minutes. The asymmetric special powers lengthen the game but even with these extra abilities and a full complement of five players your plays are likely to come in within a filler-length 20 minutes or so.
