If your curious about how this game came about, here is some reading about the process and ideas that went into the game! This is the 2nd part. Go here for the 1st.
I know some people have problem with dice. Most likely they are scarred by too many roll and move-games from their childhood and failed attribute tests. I can’t blame them, I certainly also had my fair share 🙂 But they are also very flexible randomizers as well as beautiful objects. I mean just look at this piece of heaven!
So when considering resources for Dicetopia they became an easy choice and a central part of the game. The dice fitted perfect with the swapping mechanics and presented tons of great opportunities for variety, manipulation and interaction. They also eliminated any fiddlyness that different amounts of tokens would have caused. Besides, they looked really classy on the city map!
The dice became the main focus of the game, so Dicetopia felt like quite the fitting name. The very first name however was actually Diceopia, but a wise man suggested Dicetopia would be a more fitting name for my dark futuristic vision, in which I wholeheartedly agree 🙂
So the dice determined the value of your loot, the value for dominating neighbourhoods and they also became crucial for the next addition to the game, the missions!
To a large extent, all information is completely open in Dicetopia. You see who controls each neighbourhood, what points it will bring and what dice all players have. So including secret missions felt like a great addition, to give the game that extra layer of tension and variety, making each game feel different.
To make this work I divided the dice in three different colors representing; weapons (purple), information (teal) and money (white). They felt like very fitting resources for what my factions was set out to do 🙂
Of course mechanically the different names doesn’t matter at all, they only represents different colors. But it actually helped quite a lot when coming up with different missions and provided some extra flavor, as well as helping people with color sight difficulties distinguish the difference. And it just feels soooo much better to send out your agent to snatch weapons in order to succeed with a smuggler mission, than to simply collecting purple dice 🙂
I’ve spent a lot of time creating as varied and interesting missions as possible. Everything from collecting/avoiding numbers and different colors, to trying to achieve different kind combinations and dominations. But how do you go about deciding what is worth what?
Next up. The Balance & Special Abilities!