Quarriors...Dominion on Dice

There are a lot of games that have been putting out dice versions of their existing board game brands. Settlers of Catan, Through the Ages, Ticket to Ride, Set, Yahtzee...oh...wait.

This game isn't an extension of a brand, but it has the Dominion feel. There have been several rival games riding Dominion's wave...and now there's a dice version. Wizkids produced a fairly good game made by a couple of veteran game designers Mike Elliott and Eric Lang. (Disclaimer: Known to me, not best friends. I think I have their cards somewhere. I would still say their games suck if they sucked.)

Saying "and now" previously is somewhat tricky. It actually came out in August, but it didn't show up on my radar until a recent game night. The game has an expansion that came out recently - following a rough game development schedule for CCGs, I bet they gave Wizkids the initial game in January 2011, and started working on expansions between other projects almost immediately. If I were a betting man, I'd say there were at least 3 expansions they've submitted to Wizkids at this point.

The game is all about dice. Instead of a deck of your own cards, you have a dice bag. Instead of a discard pile, you have an area where you set aside used dice until you run out of dice in your bag. The turn starts, and we'll skip the first phase...scoring.

1. Scoring: the idea is that you want Glory, aka victory points. If you manage to keep a creature die around for the entire run around the table, you score it for 1-4 points.
2. Roll dice: 6 dice. Do what they say, based on the cards on the table. At the beginning of the game, you set out 3 stock cards (a mana card, a basic creature card, and a reroll+add dice card). You deal out 3 random spells, and 7 random creatures. (Mostly random - each card has a color associated with it as well as 5 dice, and you can't put the same 5 dice on two different cards...)
3. Pay for creatures, set aside spells that were rolled. (Choosing to keep a creature die around will cost 1-3 mana, from mana rolled that turn.)
4. Kill off rival creatures. Let's say you summoned a creature with a 2 attack, and one with a 4 attack...you do 6 damage to each players' creatures. Your opponent chooses the defender order...it's possible they bring a stout defender up to protect their other dice.
5. Buy a die. Just like Dominion, you only get one Buy action. Add a new die, if you have the mana to buy it (cost is on the card).
6. Cleanup. Move dice away from your creatures and spells that you kept into a "Used" pile (discard).

Scoring is actually a bigger perk that just VP...you get to get rid of one of your dice from the used pool, accelerating the 'win' of scoring.

Overall, it's pretty interesting. There's dice, there's random dice being drawn from your bag...it has a skill element equivalent to Yahtzee, where you maximize what you can from your dice and you know it'll never be perfect. The rules can be messy. But it's a good 2-4 player game, that wraps up in 30-40 minutes.

*50+ plays later - the support for this is poor. There's one FAQ that was put out in August, which answers a couple of questions, but leaves unanswered key others. (For example, can you attach a spell during scoring?) It makes for a tough-to-love 4 player game...I think most of our 4-player games, one person ends up with 0-1 points. 2 & 3 are pretty good though.