Dice Masters Review

Dice Masters Review

Overview -

Dice Masters is a 2 player collectable dice and card based game by Wizkids (based around the same booster mechanic as games like Magic the gathering). At this point the game is now on its 7th expansions set with new ones being released about every quarter.  Themed seemingly around nothing in particular, the main franchise for Dice masters is currently Marvel (3 sets with 1 upcoming) vs. the rest such as DC that's now on 2 expansions then Dungeons and Dragons and Yu-Gi-Oh on 1.  There are also rumours of a TMNT expansion set on the horizon.

For a Marvel fan like me this stuff is sweet

Components -

There are 2 parts to Dice masters, the dice themselves and the cards that go with them, both are good quality, the dice especially are I would say about 90-95% clear depending on the set you play, some now and then can be a strange colour mixture to a point where they aren’t exactly clear and you have to strain a little to see exactly what they do/are. 

The Cards to indicate the characters you use have very nice art work, generally stolen directly from comics or other publications, they are made from decent cardboard and I've never had issues with one being damaged.  That being said the majority of the cards come in boosters and as such since there are only 2 per packet can quite frequently get bent, this isn’t the end of the world as a bit of time squashed under a book in a sleeve will usually sort that right out.

Though not directly a game component, there are also game mats you can get to play on to make the game easier to know where things should be, I do recommend these mats are they are pretty good not to mention of nice quality, my only flaw on them being the lack of artwork since they are more functional than pretty like the Magic the gathering ones tend to be.

Gameplay/how it plays -

Dice masters is a quite simple game at its core, you pick a selection of 8 heroes from the pool available (gained from either buying £1/1$ booster packs that give you 2 cards and 2 dice) place them down in front of you with also 2 action cards (these come in the basic starter set) and 8 of what they call sidekick dice (basic get you started white dice that also come in a starter set).  You then place dice on top of those cards that you can purchase mid game with energy.

You then place all your dice into a bag and pull out 4 and roll them, on the dice each one basically has 2 types of symbol an energy symbol (there are 5 different types, think the different colour mana in games again like magic the gathering or the types of resource LoTR LCG uses) and 1 symbol that is the actual sidekick/character side.  The energy symbols allow you to purchase dice from the tops of your card and place them into your bag (this part of the game plays like marvel/alien legacy or other similar deck building games where your force grows slowly stronger as you play) and the sidekick symbol becomes playable as a creature of sorts, that stays on the board and is able to fight the other player. 

The Character side has 3 numbers on it generally, top left is the cost to play the character to the board and become active (deploying or casting in many other games) the top right is the character's power and bottom right is its toughness. 

This also goes for the character dice that you purchase as the game goes on, though those dice will usually never have 5 energy symbols on them, instead they will have 3 faces with characters (3 different levels, each one stronger than the last) and 3 sides with energy specific to that character (with some symbols having 2 as a kind of double energy boost).

After you have rolled your initial dice and bought your new characters and put them into your newly bought dice discard area, the game goes on until you run out of dice in your bag, at which point you put all the dice from the discard area back into the bag and start again fresh.  This time though you have the new heroes coming out to help both bolster your energy buying power and playing as characters into the board to fight your opponent.

 Each character card that goes with the dice will have a purchase cost on it and quite often an ability of some kind (such as when it is deployed do something or when it attacks trigger an ability).  After deploying new heroes you will get the chance to attack the other player, this just like magic is a bit of a creature battle where they can attack and block and then ones that aren’t blocked do damage to the player behind them. 

Creatures that are successful in their attack are removed from the board and placed in discard though creatures that die instead are placed into a holding area to be rolled for free again the next turn in addition to the dice you roll from your bag.

The Dice bags that come with the game are known as sick bags are they aren't great quality

So that’s it, I believe I just made a simple game sound a bit complicated, however it really is simple once you get used to the basics, roll dice, buy characters, play characters, fight the enemy, roll more dice again, rinse and repeat over and over adding a few abilities to mix things up and keep it interesting plus action dice that add an extra layer of abilities to the characters (such as firing a magic missile that can hurt players or characters, buffing your combat ability or drawing extra dice that turn).

Conclusion - 

Dice Masters is a pretty good enjoyable game, the dice are fun to throw, collect and look at, the cards look good and are fun to collect, the character mechanic is tried and tested and blatantly stolen from magic the gathering but that’s a good thing since its so refined.  The actual dice collecting army-forming part is again stolen from other card builders (never played dominion but I get the feeling its like that as well as legendary). 

Each game if you don’t change the heroes can get a bit samey and when you are learning the basics it is very hard to know when to attack and when not to, so you end up each forming a huge wall of creatures that never dare attack anything out of fear of getting battered the following turn while they are waiting to return to the battlefield.

It's very nice to see that they went with a system that puts out very powerful common cards as well, no longer do you require a list of pure rares and super rares like many magic the gathering decks (sorry to again compare this game to magic but it is clearly its number 1 inspiration, that and Quarriors) costing a small fortune, here you can make a deck very cheaply and only need rares and super rares in certain character list formations you may want to go with.  Even still you would only usually need 1 of those rare cards meaning the cost to setup is incredibly cheap.

Your collection can get out of hand very fast, thankfully they do these nice collectors boxes that even come with a nice material dice bag

Also the boosters as above are crazy cheap for what you get, buying online you can tend to get a box of boosters RRP at $90/£90 (for 90 packs) for about $50/£50, quite a saving.  Each booster box usually has every single common in it and the majority of the uncommons plus about 15 rares and 2-3 super rares.  Now call me crazy but for a CCG type game 50 a quarter is not that bad at all, plus you only need to grab the sets you actually have interest in, personally I'm a marvel not DC fan so I bought the avengers set but not the DC war of light set.

The game is generally played in draft or constructed formats, so has something for players that like either of those styles of play.  Games usually take between 30mins and an hour depending on the types of character list being used and experience of the players involved.

 The balance of the game seems very good for each set for draft and usually ok for constructed depending on your list building skill (but there is an excellent community online on both Reddit and several forums/list building websites if you want to "netdeck" and copy someone else’s list they recently won a tournament with).

Each set can either be played with itself or with other sets, yes that means you can pit marvel against DC or even combine them both to have Spiderman team up with batman and an elf from dungeons and dragons if you like. 

A solid fun game that can be used as a gateway game to quite a few other titles using all their basic principles.  It can be very cheap to get into and only slightly expensive if you choose to 'go pro' with it.

Useful Links - 

Dice Masters List builder

Dice Masters Subreddit

Reserve Pool Community site

Sidekicks and Shields Community page

Blood Rage Review

Blood Rage Review

Overview -

My second review is another kickstarter game, Blood Rage which is a Norse Viking themed board game designed to Eric M. Lang and produced by Cool Mini or not.  In essence it is a euro style worker placement type game with a few twists and differences.

Components -

Another CMON game means of course a hefty price tag due to it containing fantastically sculptured miniatures.  From the basic Viking 'troops' of the game who for rank and file are very detailed to the leaders and the monsters that you can bring along, I don't think there's a single model in the game I was disappointed with.

The board and other components are also very pretty, it has beautiful art work on the board its self and the team cards, though mainly functional also look good and have things in all the right places. There are tokens for all the things you would expect there to be tokens for and these parts are all made from quality thick card.

Just like a similar game that I reviewed recently, rum and bones the game uses plastic base covers to differentiate between the clans, these have to be added and removed quite often, especially on the monsters who switch players per game and have the same issue, getting them on and off without damaging the model, you really have to be careful here not to damage them as you switch them around.

The rulebook is clear (plus very pretty art wise) and only has a few ambiguous rules that need looking up online, thankfully the forum is well visited by others with the same questions and you can get an answer quite easily.

Gameplay/How it plays -

It is the time of Ragnarok! which to non Norse fans basically means the end of the world.  The game is set on a board containing several different regions.  Through the course of 3 rounds, regions of the board will explode reducing the play area available.  As this happens players, taking control of a clan of Vikings will need to pillage the areas on the board to gain strength enough fight their way through various means to earn glory and as such points that will win that player the game.

In blood rage there are several ways to win, each one themed around different Norse gods such as Loki, Thor, Odin etc.  Each god promotes different strategies that you can build around, Loki for example grants glory for dying as much as possible, others want you to purely die in Ragnarok and then for every Viking that goes to Valhalla (Viking heaven) at the end of the turn they return to the board granting victory points for doing so.

Of the 3 phases of the game, each one has a small deck of cards that gets steadily more powerful to make the game feel like it is progressing and becoming more intense as it goes on, in that deck you will get things like upgrades for your basic troops, upgrades for your leader, upgrades for your ship, gives you quests, monster summoning cards and battle buffs (these act a bit like magic the gathering instant spell buffs, if you have ever played that they are like giant growth that purely increases the strength of a creature for just that attack).

At the beginning of each phase the deck of upgrades is drafted between the players to help you theme your deck to a certain play style around a particular god or pair of gods.  Then each turn as one of your actions you can play the upgrade cards to buff your units.  Units are then placed on the board at the cost of the games mana style known as rage, you essentially pay x amount of rage to put a unit in and then when you run out of rage you cant play anymore units until it resets next round.

You can then choose to pillage regions at which point other clans can fight you for it, resulting in a battle at which point both sides may use the battle upgrade cards to secretly buff their clans.  After the dust settles if the attackers win they get the pillage bonus and increase the stat matching the card on the board for that region.

Rage can be increased by said pillaging and other game effects, leading as you progress to more troops being played each round.  In addition to this there is also a cap on the number you can actually put into play at any one time, which like rage can be increased also. Finally the 3rd stat that can be increased is a bonus to exactly how many points you get for winning a battle.

Once 3 rounds of mayhem, pillaging and destruction are complete, everyone totals up their score from the Euro game ring around the board and the winner is the person with the most glory.

Conclusion -

I have to say I really like Blood rage, it has a lot of depth and different ways to build each clan, even though they start identical to each other than in art work you can build each one differently depending on the cards you draw and strategy you decide to play.  It isn't without flaws here though because if you draw badly it could end up affecting you for the entire game.

For the most part the game is smooth, each turn is quite quick and is very easy to pick up and learn, our gaming group had it nailed down after just 1 game turn, yet it has a feel of an 'easy to learn difficult to master' type game just because of the card play archetypes having so many different options to them.

As I detailed above, everything is pretty components wise so there's very little complains in that area, it's a joy to play with such nice models and a detailed board.  

In our group with had about 10 games and were still raring for more, as each game plays differently we all won and lost several times each, it didn't seem an easy game to dominate for any game group. When players started ganging up on each other or developing grudges following a particularly brutal move by one clan to wipe out another it threw the games even more into the air of not knowing who would win.  In one of our games exactly that happened resulting in a quite amusing stand off each round of them beating each other up while the others tried to work around it.

The balance seems fairly spot on for each god's victory condition though the tough part can be getting all the pieces of the puzzle for your specific strategy.  All it takes is another player deciding he wants to switch to your win condition and both of you will struggle, this is a bit like a draft in many other games and is caused by there only being a small number of players.  The only other options is to not draft at all and just deal out cards, sadly that's more a case of get what you are given and no-one at that point has a solid win condition unless they get lucky on the deal.

Apparently the game plays like a board game called Kemet, however I have never played that so don't know if that is true, though if you have that might be a good baseline for you to work against for a comparison.

I would recommend this game, if you can get over the cost and like the Viking theme (who doesn't like Vikings they are up there with pirates and ninjas!) then its a solid quality well made game with many hours of replay value in it.

Happy Pillaging!