December 10, 2006: Dice Wars and kdice
Two versions of a Risk-like war games played with dice. And other Risk games.
Posted on 2006-12-10 23:55 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
Aside from Slave Hack, which I wrote about on December 2, and which suddenly got old, I’ve been playing Dice Wars a bit lately. It’s a simple, fun and fast variant of Risk—but instead of armies, you just fight with dice, and you play against a number of computer opponents.
The rules are simple: You may attack any adjacent area, and you roll with all the dice in the area you attack from against all the dice in the area you attack. Whoever rolls most wins, and moves all the dice into the attacked area save one. At the end of your turn, you are given as many dice as your biggest number of connected areas, and these armies are distributed randomly. You can have up to eight dice in an area, and if you earn more than there’s room for, you save them for a later turn.
A few strategies have crystallized as I’ve played, and the first rule of Dice Wars is: Be patient! Spreading yourself out too thin is not the way to win.
In the beginning, there’s no use in expanding more than one area, because if you have, say, three sets of two adjacent areas each, you only get two dice, which would have to be distributed among your six areas, whereas if you have one area alone and five connected ones, you’d get five instead of two.
Also, dividing your opponents’ areas into smaller parts is a good idea, since you can dramatically reduce their income that way if you manage to keep it divided.
Later in the game, save up so your areas are all filled up with eight dice each. Now every attack requires an income of eight dice to keep it that way. If you have an income of eight, you can safely attack one enemy area each turn and still be filled up afterwards. If you have a surplus, keep an eye on how many extra dice you have and do a little math to figure out how many attacks you can afford each time. Do it this way, and you’ll win unless you’re very unlucky with your rolls.
If you want to try this game against real humans, head over to kdice.com, where you can do exactly that.
Also, if you like Risk, head over to Sillysoft where they have great ones for both Mac OS X and Windows. I personally found American History Lux available for free via some blog or feed which I’m not able to find again, and they’re probably not doing that anymore at any rate. Then again, the Sillysoft games are, like many other shareware games these days, reasonably priced.
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I made a few Lux maps a while back. Pretty fun!