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Dicemasters – Review

Whizkids / £15 – £20 / 2 Players / 10-30 mins / Age 14+ 

We went to Nottingham one weekend to visit our gaming friends and stopped by Chimera. Great shop if you are in the area, lots of stock for all the family.What struck us most was the amount of people in the shop playing the game Dicemasters.

 

Once we got home we had to investigate further. Turns out Dicemasters is a re-implementation if the deck building and dice rolling boardgame Quarriors. Now, I know all about Quarriors! We picked it up from Orcs Nest in London, it was the weekend we spent at The Ritz – fancy 🙂 (I won a competition for afternoon tea and a night’s stay, The Ritz really is a bit fancy for us!)

 

First of all there is a lot, and I mean A LOT of dice involved with this game! The dice represent various characters from the Marvel and DC comic universes among others. The best thing is you can mix and match the franchises, so if you ever wanted to know who would win a Superman v Iron Man showdown, have a Dicemasters battle to settle it!

The artwork is fantastic, not something I normally say for a Whizkid game. As much as I love playing Star Trek Attack Wing, the pixelated artwork on the cards always disappoints me. The artwork on the Dicemasters cards is spot on and the high quality of the dice is brilliant. We have never noticed mis-casts and are always intrigued by the multitude of logos and colours used to keep the dice looking different from one another.

 

The object of the game is to choose your team and battle against another player. In fact Dicemasters shares a lot of similarities with Magic The Gathering – building your own deck, spending resources to field dice and purchase further dice to add to your abilities.

Dicemasters is a two player game, super easy to learn, bit of a nightmare to master. If you purchase the starter sets you have everything you need to jump in straight away and play. Yet I would not recommend playing with a loved one. I have only played this with Mike and I find it very confrontational. We both horde character dice and wait until the last minute to attack! It could just be us, we don’t like to cause bad feelings when playing boardgames and would rather win by skill than attacking another player.

The ultimate crossover movie I would love to see Deadpool vs Wolverine – are you listening Marvel?!! 😉

We also struggle with all the different rules and abilities for each character. The idea of the game is simple enough, roll the dice and decide what to do with how they land. Field characters ready to battle, spend energy to do this or buy more dice, attack another player with character dice. However each character has an ability on their card and you can pay for extra bonus dice that also come with abilities. Some of these are global, so all players can use the ability and it all just gets a bit confusing in the heat of the battles. We just forget half of the things we could be doing – oops!

 

It seems to take forever to build the deck you want to play with, then no time at all to play. I guess because it is just the two of us we play the one game and remember we dont really like Dicemasters! There are so many rules we find it unmanageable. If you have a lot of gaming friends or you go to a shop to play you will get to learn your deck as you battle with everyone around you over and over.

Now that Dicemasters is a few years old it can be found in most gaming shops in one version or another. When it first came out it was THE hit game to play and sold out almost instantly. In fact we are already seeing people moving onto the new shiney dice rolling game, Star Wars Destiny and the same thing is happening, it is selling out fast. Have no fear, if it can be sold, it will be restocked, be patient my Padowan! Another problem I find with these games is the collectable part. You may be able to play with just the base pack, but you get sucked into buying boosters for variation. Time and time again I find myself buying booster packs for the fun of it! I do like finding new packs for the likes of Deadpool and the Flash. Opening packets to find new characters or see if you have a foil card is exciting to me. At £1 for two cards and two dice it is one of the most inexpensive gaming purchases! It hooks you in when you know you could get the same characters with stronger abilities, or you find a super rare card and you end up just spending so much money on one game! Word of warning the big ‘Set Up/Collectors’ boxes are not worth the money. They only have enough dice for one person to play and there are so many other ways you can store your dice and cards if you want.

 

The one and only foil card we have between us!

If you like deck building, have lots of friends to battle and do not mind investing the time to really learn all the different cards you will really enjoy Dicemasters. If like us you do not want to invest that much time on one game when you have so many to choose from, we would recommend sticking to Quarriors. It is the same game, yet all players collect dice from a pool in the middle. There are a limited number of cards within the game and you soon learn what you are doing. The focus changes back to battling the other players, not figuring out how to build your deck and the tone of abilities you could use.

 

For more information check out:

Dicemasters – Whizkids

Dicemasters – Board Game Geek

 

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Reference Pig Time!

As a thank you for reading our review of Dicemasters, here are some videos of our Guinea Pigs #scampiandbudbuds

 

Heeeeere’s Scampi – destroying a wall of dice!

An epic slow mo of Buddy showing those dice who’s boss!

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