The more dice, the merrier

🎲 Rolling in Wonderland is the next upcoming game from Bellows Intent . The title kind of gives some of the game away: 
First, you have the evergreen Alice in Wonderland theme, so actions revolve around the well-known story and its characters.
Then there are dice 🎲, and lots of them. This is a dice drafting game with an interesting restriction. Let’s dive in! 😉

At the start of every round, all the dice are rolled, and are assigned to the appropriate sections of the game board. The board is split up into 6 sections, each corresponding to a character and the same dice symbol - e.g. Cheshire Cat. 😼 These 6 sections are also the 6 different actions you can do in the game, each a different mini-game basically. 🙂

On your turn you have to choose a section and draft dice from there. The more dice you take, the stronger the action, plus the dice colors are also important for some of them. Here comes the twist: ☝️ You have to take all of the dice from a section (or as many as you can), and as you only have space for 6 dice on your player board, that means you are out of the round after drafting 6 dice. You always have to consider whether this is worth it, though sometimes you might not have any other option.

A quick glimpse at the actions:
🐇The White Rabbit just moves you on a track for end game points.
🐛The Caterpillar is another track, but it triggers other actions as you go up steps.
🎩The Mad Hatter gives you cards that either provide ongoing benefits or one-time effects.
♥️The Queen of Hearts lets you place soldiers that are used in area majority scorings.
👱🏻‍♀️Alice provides challenge cards, and cubes to cover up slots on them to earn extra points. 
🐈Cheshire Cat lets you activate some of 4 different effects depending on the dice colors.

💬All these different actions are very simple on their own, so the primary challenge of the game is planning which actions to do, and timing them well. The game is really dynamic, as rounds are quick, and the board state keeps changing due to drafting and rerolls. So even though this is more at a light family level, the gameplay is engaging.