Dice Wars is a very nice little Flash strategy game, mentionned on Phil Steinmeyer’s blog. The basic rules are pretty simple. You have a number of dice in each of your territories and can attack neighbouring territories by rolling your dice against theirs. If you get a higher roll, you take control of the enemy’s territory by moving all your dice in it, except one who stays to protect your previous territory. If you get a lower roll, you lose all your dice but one. At the end of the turn, you get assigned, in a random territory, one new dice per contiguous territory you control. The winner is whoever is able to control the whole map.
That’s all there is to it. Even with the simplicity of the rules, there’s a surprising amount of strategy in the game. Kudos to whoever created this game, it’s not easy getting good simple ideas. It’s easy to have good big ideas (”It’s Oblivion meets GTA, but bigger and you can play it either as a MMORPG or single player!” is the type of things aspiring game designers usually come up with — hey, I did it too) but the art is in coming up with good, simple stuff.
Another simple and fun game in this category is Planarity, which I think I mentionned in the past.
April 6th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Cool Game this. How many die are required if I was to create a real board game?
April 6th, 2008 at 9:46 am
As is, the game requires up to 10 dice per region — which is a lot of dice. You could, of course, just put a number on each region to show its strength and then you’d need just 10 dice for the whole game.