The joy of crafting your own dice

🎲 Dice Forge is a game I wanted to try for a long time now, but was never sure if it is interesting and replayable enough to be worth it. Well now we saw it for cheap so it was time. 😃

Dice Forge is really unique - a dice-crafting game, similar to a deck-builder. Instead of cards, you collect dice faces! The game has special plastic dice with removable faces so you can buy new ones and upgrade them. On the plus side you never have to shuffle cards, however because these are dice you might never actually roll the expensive face you crafted onto them. 😅 So I guess it is a double-edged sword.

Resources are tracked on the player boards. You have money which is used to buy die faces, and there are moon and sun shards that are used to buy cards. Cards give end game victory points and/or abilities you can activate at the start of your turns. You also track victory points on your board that you can during the game.

At the start of the active player’s turn everyone gets to roll their two dice and get what’s on them - which will mostly be resources or vp. Then only the active player can use his cards, then decide to buy either new die faces or one card. At the end he can optionally buy a bonus action for 2 sun shards.

Die faces that are bought are not replenished, so the temple holding them gets quickly depleted. It’s a bit fiddly but fun crafting your dice, trying to make some combos. The cards are also limited so get what you need fast! There are more card types than you can use in a single game so there is some variability in the setup.

💬 All in all Dice Forge is like I expected to be. Crafting the dice feels good, and just like deckbuilding, it would be great as a side mechanism in a game. We had fun playing it, however there is not much replayability or strategy to explore for us here… as it basically plays itself. It’s like Dominion, but even more random.
But if you enjoy pure deck builders and you want something light and easy to teach, this could be a good choice.
I have to mention the art, which is absolutely amazing in my opinion, simply a joy to look at. 🥰