Maximising efficiency, sitting in silence thinking at a table, brining friends to your house just to not interact with them. Do those things sound fun to you? If they do you’ll love euro-games. Because euro-games are board games stripped of nearly all player interaction and just give you a puzzle to think about. And then at the end of the game you look at your friend’s puzzles and you say “oh, you puzzled better than me” Dice Forge is a euro-game, yet I somehow find it quite social. And I hope by the end of this review I can figure out why.

Let me bring you up to speed by explaining the basics of Dice Forge. In Dice Forge it uses a unique mechanic of you customising your dice and rolling them. Each turn everyone rolls their two dice and get some rewards. then the player whose turn it is gets to either buy a card or upgrade one of their dice faces. To upgrade a dice face you spend gold (one of the game’s currencies) and buy a face, you then physically remove a face on one of your dice and replace it with a new one. Now I know what you’re thinking “this is obviously a gimmick, why can’t you just have a deck of cards instead”. Fair point, but once you pop off a dice face and replace it with a new one, you will realise how fun it is to customise your dice. Because if you’re not interested in a tactile and social experience, just go play a video game instead. And Dice Forge gets this and makes a game that is tactile, social, and still a great puzzle.

The other side of the game is the cards, and these are where you get the big bucks. If you want to start racking up the real victory points you will need to spend sun and moon crystals (the games other two currencies) to get cards. Cards provide different special powers and straight up victory points. The game also provides you with more types of cards than you can fit in one game, so once you’re experienced enough you can choose what cards you want to play with. And all of these cards are creative and fun, from the big point scoring hydra that everyone races to grab before they’re all gone, to the hammer that lets you spend any gold you earn on a track which if you get far enough on you get victory points.

This interplay between the cards and the dice make foe a really interesting game where in the early game players make a mad dash for the dice faces until they realise that the haven’t made a single victory point and start rushing for cards. And you will also stop collecting die faces because you have limited resource storage(that can be upgraded by a card). This does however become a bit of a problem, because in the late game it’s never really a question of “should I get a die face or should I get a card?” anymore, it’s almost always the best decision to get a card. But there is still strategy of which card to get.

I think Dice Forge might be social because you’re all rolling dice at the same time. It’s a group activity, you can laugh at your friends misfortune, and despair when they succeed. This bit of luck makes the game more lighthearted, and because everything you roll is good for you, you can never get to upset about a bad roll. But even the luck can’t counter dice forge’s biggest problem: snowballing. You see, if a player does really well in the early game it will be hard for them to lose later on. They just get really good dice that they use to buy the best permanent cards, and then they grab all the high point cards before anyone else can get a chance to catch up. The closest to a close ending you can get is a close race between two people, which is fun for those two people, and those two people.

Bur if you can still enjoy a game while you are losing and know you can’t come back, you will almost definitely enjoy dice forge. And even if you’re like me and don’t like losing, you probably will still enjoy Dice Forge. It’s got deep puzzles but is quick and approachable for new players as well. I don’t consider myself an artist, but I really like the artwork. And it’s got a fun gimmick that doesn’t detract from gameplay. If you wan’t a great entrance into euro-gaming, then I would Dice Forge is definitely a game for you.