Social Isolation Report Day 12 – Roland Wright: The Dice Game

Day 12 – Roland Wright: The Dice Game

Day 12 of social isolation. I played the solo variant of Roland Wright: The Dice Game. This is a dice game. Who’d have thought, right!  You’re playing as Roland Wright, a game designer. That’s right folks, this is a dice game about making games!

You’re rolling the dice on your turn, group colors, and selecting one color to use as bits for your game. You can never group more than 3 together. If you have 4 yellow dice, then it’s a group of 3 and a group of 1.

Once you selected to color, you place them on your board. You can place them anywhere on your board.

After you place your bits, you can choose to erase a color and do a special action. You can only do one a turn.

• Red – Copy and connect a bit. So you copy a color, and connect that color to the one copied.
• Orange – Move any other bit to a different spot.
• Yellow – Change the yellow bit to a different color.
• Green – Draw 3 Hallmark cards, and keep one.
  • Hallmark cards have patterns that you need on the board to claim. They are worth victory points at the end of the game.

• Blue – Draw 3 equipment cards, keep one.
  • Equipment cards have patterns you need to complete to claim them. Once claimed, you tuck them under the board. Each equipment card has a special ability you can use instead of erasing a bit.

• Purple – Draw 1 research and development card.
  • Research and Development cards have either victory points on them or bits you can place. You have to choose which one you want as soon as you draw it.

The game also has inspiration cards that each player gets one. This is what your game is about, and what colors you get points for at the end of the game.

Each game will have 3 award cards.  You’ll get bonus points for completing these tasks.

In the solo game, you’re playing over 21 rounds. When you choose a color of dice, you write that number on the colored spot on the solo board. During the game, you can use Red and Purple to mitigate the dice you rolled. Green and Blue add to the number of cards you draw for those colors. Yellow and Orange come into play on your 7th and 14th turn. If your number in yellow is less than the number of dice you have, yo lose a die. Then Orange, you roll Yahtzee style keeping all orange rolled.  Subtract that from the number there, if it’s 0, you discard a claimed card. Those two can hurt you!

This is probably one of the heaviest roll and writes I’ve played. There’s a lot going on in the game. Pattern building, activating abilities, then adding equipment to and adding even more abilities, then managing the yellow and orange numbers to prevent the bad outcomes. I enjoyed the solo game due to that. If you’re not into hard puzzles, this roll and write probably isn’t for you. I ended up with 42 points, and got to the novice level. I don’t know how this game will be with multiple players. I can see it taking a while each turn due to passing the markers around. Then each player deciding on where and what to place.