by Justin Bell

Some friends recently hosted an all-day gaming session; sadly, a work trip forced me to miss out. The theme for the session was loosely inspired by dice drafting games, but it then stretched to include dice chuckers, roll-and-writes, worker placement with dice workers, and games that I am going to include even though I can’t quite place the specific way they use dice. I just know that dice were factored into the equation.

On the flight home, I spent some time dreaming up a perfect day of games based on a variety of dice mechanics. (This is one of my favorite things to explore in BGG’s database: looking up games by family or mechanic.) For my Dream Dice Day, all the games had to prominently feature dice, ideally with the use of dice drafting and/or dice placement mechanics. As long as dice were involved, I made the case to include the game for Dream Dice Day. My dream, my rules!

I used the timeframe that my friends used for their dice game day, about eight hours, give or take. With that as our frame, let’s check out my perfect day!

Pre-Game Appetizers: Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition and En Route

I’m not a big roll-and-write guy. I don’t love playing games alone, but nothing is stranger to me than playing games with friends while also…well, playing the game alone. More often than not, I watch as someone rolls a pool of dice, then regret my decision to play a game where we are sitting together, trying to figure out who can optimize the results of the shared dice in front of us. Usually, the only time someone speaks is when the next dice chucker says something like “everybody good?” before chucking those dice again.

That changes with two games that now serve as my “It’s halftime of an NBA playoff game and need something to play solo” titles, Railroad Ink and En Route. Both offer a fun, compact, quick challenge for the brain as I try to optimize my scores. I have two versions of Railroad Ink—the Deep Blue Edition and the Archipelago boards—so I can mix and match expansions. En Route’s solo challenge system and wide variety of maps work wonders, and while the base game uses a flip-and-write system, the dice variant from my copy of En Route: Special Edition is my preferred move. And the dice featured in En Route have that nice, hefty chunk to them.

If someone shows up late, I can squeeze one or both of these titles in with ease. That person in your playgroup who texts with the inevitable “Justin, you won’t believe this, but I’ll be 20 minutes late” problem? No problem at all, since I’ll keep the appetizers warm with these games until everyone arrives.

Noon: The Red Cathedral

2020’s The Red Cathedral, designed by the duo known as “Llama Dice” (Shei S. and Isra C.) and published by Devir, features a main mechanic that I adore. One of a player’s three options on a turn is to select a die from a central rondel by moving the die in a clockwise direction the number of spaces equal to the pips showing on the die. Then, the active player receives the reward on the space where the die ended up, and the die is re-rolled, giving the next player a fresh set of die selections to choose from.

Moving the die to just the right spot is a crunchy choice I love. The color choice of the die will often trigger a wave of bonuses on the player’s personal board, depending on upgrades made earlier in the game. Finding ways to move a die onto a space with as many as two other dice might triple the bonuses a player can receive. And each quadrant of the rondel offers the active player a different bonus, so figuring out which die to move and to which quadrant is a juicy choice, but one that doesn’t bog down the game with deliberations.

1:30 PM: Tiletum

The same two imaginary players who join me for The Red Cathedral would then take part in a play of Tiletum, a 2022 release from the team at Board&Dice designed by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. The dice drafting here is genius. The color of the die and the visible pips represent the number of resources a player receives. The pips on the die’s opposite face (i.e., NOT showing on the die) grant the player a number of actions equal to the D6 inversion of the resource choice.

Every turn, you are choosing how many resources and how many action points you have from a pool of seven, since the total of every D6’s opposite faces always equals seven. If I want to take a merchant action worth three action points, that means I’m getting four resources of the chosen die color.

Dice are limited, and randomly drawn from a cloth bag to start each of the game’s four rounds…with some colors potentially left out of that round. While one of the game’s resources (gold) allows a player to change a die’s pip value, you might not have enough gold to make changes. That might leave you in a sizable hole with very limited choices. Each round’s scoring goal gives players three turns to maximize their chances at points in a round, giving the dice drafting a very nice blend of tactical and strategic choices.

With three players who play as fast as I typically do, Tiletum plays in about 30 minutes per player. That gives us time to play and grab a quick snack between games.

3:30 PM: The White Castle

The Devir dice double dip wraps with The White Castle, another Llama Dice masterpiece featuring dice drafting on an epic scale but in a very tidy package. In fact, The White Castle might be my favorite dice drafting game of them all, and even at four players, the game wraps in about 75 minutes.

The die drafting choices here are a blast, but they are even more interesting when there are a wide range of die values to begin each of the game’s three rounds. Triggering the lantern bonuses by taking the lowest-value die is one thing, but it’s a whole other thing when the “lowest” value die is a five or a six, almost guaranteeing a player extra coins to go along with the lantern goodies.

I prefer The White Castle at two or four players, so let’s assume another imaginary friend came over to join the first three players for the middle of the day, giving us a four-player playthrough.

4:45: Grand Austria Hotel

I think most regulars who visit BGG know that Grand Austria Hotel is glorious. Most players in my network prefer Grand Austria Hotel with some of the extras from the Let’s Waltz! expansion, but for the purposes of Dream Dice Day, I’m going with the following modules from that expansion: Start Player (so that players go in a clockwise order every turn, not the “snake” order where the first player also goes eighth in a four-player game), Would You Like Some More? (simply, more cards), and Unique Hotels, so that each player has their own asymmetric player power.

That means the game can wrap in about 90 minutes. The module with the dancers, Vienna Ballrooms, is fantastic, but it usually means adding 30-60 minutes of playtime. On Dream Dice Day, I’m focused!!

6:30 PM: Kingsburg

I’m finishing the day with the Dream Dice Day Daddy of ‘Em All: Kingsburg, ideally the first edition board with the expansion To Forge a Realm, specifically Module 5. That’s the module which replaces the die roll during the eighth phase of each round with the reinforcement tokens. These tokens give players a chance to plan around the potential baddie (zombies, goblins, etc.) lurking at the end of the round. Once players have seen Module 5 even once, they never go back to playing the game the old-fashioned way.

If forced, I will play Kingsburg at four players…but, we all know that the best way to play Kingsburg is with five players. In that way, Dream Dice Day has to have a fifth player show up only for the nightcap, but I’m sure I could find someone willing and able to stop by to fill that final seat. That’s because you want Kingsburg to be as tight as possible, and five players is solid gold. Scores are always close, and one wrong move (or one destroyed building) is usually the difference between winning and losing.

The dice placement in Kingsburg is brilliant. It’s full of drama. Cursing at the table is a guarantee, especially when two or three players have not rolled well during a season and are all fighting for scraps at the bottom of the pyramid. The +2 tokens are huge, almost as huge as the Market power that lets a player manipulate a die value +/-1 to snipe a space that you thought you had control of.

Kingsburg is a rich way to wrap things up, but I’d love to hear the lineup you would table instead! Maybe I’ll use your advice to plan my next Dream Dice Day…