Pyradice
- Board's Eye View
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
In Pyradice, from Arcane Wonders and MEBO Games, the two players are drafting dice from a central three-dimensional pyramid to place on their two-dimensional pyramid board. The game is designed by André Silva.
It's an easy-to-play game but it'll play differently each time because, in set up, you randomly apply a scoring criteria for each row of the 2D pyramids. In addition, each row above the first can trigger a special action. Again these will vary between plays. The actions always affect other dice in your 2D pyramid so might, for example, let you alter the number of a die you've already placed. You may very well want to do that in order to satisfy the scoring criteria for a row. The dice in the game are in four colours and you can additionally incorporate cards that give scoring objectives that apply solely to one die colour. These generally offer better potential rewards than the 5 points you will score for satisfying the criteria in a row so the cards may well skew players' choices of dice and placement.
Pyradice is a two-player strategy game where you're mostly focused on optimising the scoring on your own pyramid board but you might also want to have regard for what dice your opponent may be after because when you draft a die you'll usually be releasing a die in the level below and making it available for your opponent to draft... That's most likely to be the case with some of the cards, as these mostly reward the player with the most dice of an assigned colour or give a bonus to the first player to collect a set number of one colour of dice.
At around 20 minutes, this is a brisk, light, filler-length game that offers a puzzle optimisation challenge that you won't find unduly taxing.
