The 4 Squares Review: Dice Throne Adventures

[Music] welcome to the dice tower a series of video reviews about board and card games here are your hosts hey everybody i'm tom vassell i'm chris yee i'm mike delecio and i'm roy canaday today we got something a little bit different in regards to a game because i feel like we're reviewing a game except it's actually an expansion and that's dice thrown adventures which is an expansion for both dice thrown series one and series two they're the same thing just make different people but it also is a completely different game but you also can't buy it and play it without owning one of those other two confused yet so before we actually we're gonna show you dice thrown adventures in just a second but before we do that i wanted to quick give us a rundown from all of us as to what we think of dice thrown the normal game boy what would you think i really enjoyed daiso and i played with you several times um and i've played it in different situations i used to i played it when the first edition came out i had a friend in my game group who i played it with as well i really enjoyed the game and i think it's a great head-to-head yahtzee style rolling off battling i mean i know you've said it before but like it feels like king of tokyo that you would play with two players but it's a lot of fun knocking each other out in their hit points and things like that with tons of different special powers and building up those combos what about you mike yeah this is my preferred dice combat game for two players this is kind of my favorite of the yahtzee style dice battlers i i like it a lot and chris i i've always enjoyed this one a lot more than i thought that i would because i'm not always into the confrontational head-to-head kind of playing game but something about that deck of cards you draw from the dice the yantzi rolling it's very simple but very comboy and very just pleasant i also really enjoy it and in fact as this video goes up i took a look at dice thrown re-rolled where they re-did series one tell you my thoughts on the game and how they've changed i used to like it now i i like it much more than i used to but this is different this takes that game and plugs it into a dungeon crawl of sorts chris is going to show you how here's the setup of dice thrown adventures if you're familiar with the game you'll notice this part is just dice thrown which is required to have either season 1 or season 2 characters to play but this is the new stuff over here this giant card caddy comes with the monsters and the dungeon tiles that you'll set up according to the setup chart there are different variations for the different snares there's eight of them in total i'm going to show you a portal crawl scenario and then i will also show you with new setup what the boss battles look like you'll alternate between portal crawl and then boss battle so you follow the setup here including health and all those other things and then you simply begin playing to do so you first move and then encounter and explore the dungeon tiles so if i'm the monk i can choose to move orthogonally and i'll go over here to this tile here flip it over level one tiles are easier than level twos easier than threes easier than the final boss portal over there and when i flip over a tile you gain whatever benefits are here on the side you get whatever effects happen here some of these are straight up bad where some of these have opportunities for rolling dice and pushing your luck to try and see what maybe you get something good maybe get something worse and then finally you summon a minion in this case a level one minion for me the monk to be engaged in combat with i pull it out here uh it has eight health and it's going to be trying to roll its own special chaos dice to affect us you do the normal dice thrown combat where you'll roll the dice up to three times and you try and get whatever symbols you want and inflict damage and then at the end of that you defend for the minion who will get their own special defense and then they're going to roll all five of the chaos dice and try and get certain combinations of things in this case they want to roll as many white symbols as possible if i pulled out the chaos elf they're trying to roll straight when you defeat a minion you get a special reward and so the rewards are determined by the loot dice a special d20 that you roll and compare against this chart so if i defeated it in combat i rolled a two which means i consult hey that was a level one minion so i get a level one treasure and this is a token which will allow me to inflict one extra damage in the future dystonia is just full of these special ability tokens whereas you can see there's health there's gold which are tracked for future purchases as you go along the campaign and even specialty cards that you get to add to your player deck making yourself stronger over the sort over the course the campaign eventually players will take turns they can assist each other in combat or eventually explore and get all of these shards these dice shards once you succeed in these areas will be thrown over onto the final portal once all of them are collected players can take their turns and eventually move over here to this portal engaging in the final combat each scenario each portal crawl has its own level 4 boss minion that you will be fighting against and in this case we drew the emperor cobra the emperor cobra will have 30 health that you'll be fighting against and it is seeking for its own special variation of of rolling dice and poisoning you and defending you and everything there's also a new mechanism introduced called the king's hand to make these special minions more difficult where if you use an ultimate a yahtzee of sixes against it it will spend these to try to force you to re-roll one of your dice or if it does not succeed at hitting its target it will also spend one of these to take another turn so that's what a portal crawl looks like i'm going to reset this up so you can see what the next scenario a boss battle would look like here's what the other scenarios the boss battles are going to look like you'll notice that there is a fallen barbarian there are four simulated bosses that you'll be fighting against they're set up with a certain number of special upgraded cards stronger versions of their basic abilities and they have a few kings hand tokens every time you the players take a turn they will roll their combat dice and the the boss will defend and then the boss will fight against them at the end of the pyromancer's turn that comes over to the monk the monk will roll their dice three times fight against the barbarian who will defend then the barbarian fights back against the monk and so on the barbarian's turn he will flip over his top card he'll get an income of one card and one combat point then you'll see can he afford these combat points if he can he will go ahead and take whatever the effect is spending them do whatever the effect of the card is and then he'll have a role objective as defined down here in this case getting as many whites as possible so he's going to roll up to three times to try and get as many whites as he can and then he looks and sees what is the biggest priority attack that he can do if he meets multiple if he meets multiple conditions he will go ahead and do whatever has the highest priority number here in the corner and unleash that damage on the active player if the boss reveals an orange card they won't resolve this until it's relevant so in this case they'll roll for extra damage but players also get small little benefits along the way in the top right corner of these boss decks and the point of this is just a straight up brawl to see can you eliminate their health or will players lose their shared combined health so that's the two game modes this is just a simulated more like a normal combat instead of the dungeon crawl this is the second fourth sixth and eighth scenarios are the different bosses also i should mention that included in the game are these legacy packs that you can unlock more content after you've played through the game [Music] all right thanks chris uh let's talk about the the components for this game i think no one's gonna complain about the beautiful uh everything i mean it's it's just gorgeous all around and in fact if you're really lucky you can get the 3d painted miniatures uh those extra which i like those a lot there's lots of unique art in this game the whole thing comes together but i do have some minor complaints first of all if you're going to play dice rolled i mean dice thrown with dice thrown adventures that's two huge boxes you're carrying around i kind of wish that it had come with uh hey i can stick a couple of the heroes in it so when i go to my friend's house i can just take this one box and not two boxes for a giant game except the game doesn't feel that giant so i wish it was a little bit more compact that's one complaint i have about the the production values the other is and this is just maybe a personal thing but i really dislike when people call things legacy that aren't legacy and it says there's legacy cards in this but they're just more cards that's not legacy that's just more cards but that's i don't know chris what do you think i think component wise especially it's this is on par with the season two quality of dice throne you know the the first one they released was good and i didn't have complaints but then when they made the new addition so to speak in this dice thrown season one re-rolled i mean they really upped the quality and i feel like this one lives up to that i don't have any issues with the tiles of the cards or any of that stuff i do agree with what you said tom that the the game trays as fantastic as they are that make the insert really really useful are also giant and so size is probably my only complaint how about you mike how about you yeah i would say that that this is one of those weird situations where i think one of the game's greatest strength is also a weakness and and you've mentioned it it's that you have these amazing game trays that you basically pull them out and that's all you need right there at least for the actual character you have to do some setup with the tiles but it also takes up a tremendous amount of room and tom i couldn't agree with you more that it would be great if you could put in a couple of characters in that box so that it would make the portability of it even with that even just one box is still a bit of a challenge but the component quality is great the art is great i was happy even with the standees the first game we played with chris we had standees that was fine although the minis are great roy what do you think i mean i think roxy does a great job with their components for this and i mean i really enjoy the way stuff looks with dice thrown i mean this is mostly we're talking about the adventure stuff so i mean you have mostly cards and things like that and a couple bosses and things like that you fight so it's not really any of the characters and stuff like that but i think they've done a good job making it fit in with all the rest of the dice thrown stuff and the quality is really nice so this is a game that kind of comes in parts you you you go through a dungeon and then you fight a boss and they split that into two parts but it's essentially it's almost it's a little weird because you fight like mini boss then you fight boss the boss plays very differently but what did you think chris about the flow of the game you're going through a dungeon crawl and where would you compare this to maybe other dungeon crawl games you've played uh this is the one this is one of the hard things is it it almost feels zero percent like a dungeon crawl really it mostly just feels like flip over the next tile and you know some silly things happen and maybe a few of them give you a choice but it it could have just been like a an event deck that you flip over and you get through a certain number of vent decks and then you can you know then you can fight the mini boss i do appreciate even though it's a little bit odd that they structured it you know the first session is a dungeon crawl and the second one is like a boss battle i appreciate that they didn't squish those two together because then that would be too long so i think that helps the game each session kind of feel like it moves along it doesn't outstay its welcome how about you mike you have any thoughts on on that yeah no i i do agree with you i think it's good that they put it into those two kind of distinct phases but i also would would agree that the the dungeon crawl is almost a red herring um because it really this game comes down to whether you're playing just regular dice thrown or you're playing dice stone adventures it comes on comes down to head-to-head battles um and you know the tiles are just who am i fighting usually i mean there there's a few different tiles in there but for the most part you're going to face a minion and that's what you're going to use to get your loot so is it dungeon crawl in feel not really it still feels like dice thrown which to some extent to me is a plus because that's you know that's what i came here for and although it changes the game a little bit it still feels like dice thrown um that's that's my take on that yeah i don't think you get a whole lot of sense of exploration in this game at all it's really just flip a towel oh there's another bad guy which you basically expect you draw it out of the deck okay what's he have this time you can sometimes get different bad guys so it's like oh well each different bad guy has sort of different themes and different things they can do and you're facing off against different stuff and there's different special abilities you have to try to figure out how to mitigate with that with the powers that you have of your current dice thrown character and there's a little bit of things you can do in this that you couldn't do in the other game with the working together with the other player because normally all of your stuff is just directly about destroying the other player you're playing with with this you can do the cooperation and maybe do a little bit of healing each other but a lot of characters depending on the character you're playing with aren't super set up very well for that sort of thing um but yeah it is is definitely interesting the dungeon crawl part of it doesn't feel super strong to me yeah it's interesting you mentioned that that there's a few powers and things on these characters that suddenly in a dungeon setting you go oh that makes that this actually works better i barely use this one in the actual right in the game and here it works a little bit better uh that being set up for me on a personal level i thought fewer is better in this particular game uh because the the way they do it is they simply distribute hit points the more people you have the problem is if you have very few hit points one or two blows can take you out and one of the things i particularly struggled with this game and it's just one um is i felt that it was difficult and really relied on luck and the weird thing is is that there's a lot of luck in dice throwing it anyway but dice storm is a really fast back and forth game i don't like playing through a whole thing of this and then i just roll poorly against one of these minions i run across and they just shellack me you know and all that and the luck in this felt more powerful it felt like you could get taken out sometimes with a blow or you just keep rolling terribly on the finding the loot chart to find stuff that's not that interesting or you can't heal yourself to save your life and i struggled with that i don't know where you all sit on that one luck is heavy and and of course like it's in the original but it does feel heavier and plays a bigger hand in this game and this is one of those uh play through a series of eight sessions where if you lose you simply replay it and maybe there's a few more interesting choices they could have made where if you lose we'll continue the story but you know you you take a loss on that campaign chart but you get compensated with a few extra power up cards or something and i think in general with that i think this as a campaign could have been a little bit more robust with more upgrades and upgrades that you feel a little bit more so i know between the luck and that you know that's a potential negative even though the core loop of the game rolling dice and everything is it's pretty fun yeah i i see what you're saying and i agree to an extent although getting back to this less is more idea i don't know that they could have done that without adding more complexity and i really like how simple the game is i i keep coming back to it still feels like dice thrown to me and that's important because again that's what i came here for um one thing i will mention and and you kind of hinted at it a little bit roy anton i think in in dice thrown adventures it's maybe more important than an even regular dice thrown the characters you pick um because as you mentioned tom if you go out and you have nobody that can heal you and you're relying on that loot chart to heal good luck because you're probably not going to roll what you need to heal and so you either need to have cards in your deck or another character that can heal you or else you you very well may die and i felt like there were times that if we had this character maybe i would have been able to get through this more easily and if you're playing in a solo campaign and i've done both i played solo and multiplayer um there is something about running that same character game after game after game i wish there was a way to to switch up characters i mean i i think i understand mechanically why you can't because you upgrade cards as you go through the game but it would be nice to be able to change that out because after a while you're like man i kind of feel like i'm doing the same powers over and over again so that's one thing i noticed roy what are your thoughts one of my favorite things about dice thrown is the fact that you get to upgrade your character as the game alongs you get you get all these cp points where you're building out these cards and like making all of your actions better um in a normal game of dice throne you start with 50 hit points which is way up there in this game i mean i think like the max even when you're playing solo is like 37 or something like that i'm not sure it's like it's regardless it's below 50. um and then the more players you have it just gets lower and lower so you actually have less time to build up those combos and build up everything in the game so your your your character feels more underpowered than it would normally feel it versus a normal head-to-head game especially at the start of the game and i'm sure as you get further in things then you're gonna unlock more cars and things like that but it feels like man i really wish i could build up more as we're going along in this game um but i still think it's an interesting way to play this game in a cooperative mode if you just really love dice thrown you played a cooperative mode or play it solo and that's what this allows you for the opportunity but it can be difficult with that minimized hit points because they want to keep that threat and pressure on you but it forces you to just like go go go go go and that's all the choices you have you know right mike i know that you like this game a lot what are some of the things that you really enjoy about it well first of all i do like that you can i'm going to be a broken record here i like that you can play this solo now that's that's you know something that obviously is important to me and and this is a game that i enjoy playing uh multiplayer and now i like having that option to play it uh solo i do feel like it is kind of cool to take a core system that you're comfortable with and see it in a slightly different light and that's what this kind of does for me is that it feels like dice thrown but now we're doing something slightly different and we can now cooperate to take on this common foe and so while the sense of exploration i agree is not really high there now to me this is just a new way to play dice thrown and for that's enough that's that's kind of what i was hoping it would be i didn't feel like i had to learn a whole new game that was really refreshing looking at the rule book the first time and going oh it's dice throne good i don't have to learn a whole new game it's just a few things to keep you know to keep track of they're a little bit different putting out tiles but at heart i liked dice throne i like cooperative games i love solo games this gives me everything in one package yeah i'm gonna see this is the thing i'm really happy with dice thrown i didn't need this extra stuff i'm not i'm not opposed to trying it out but now that i played it i want to go back to dice throw i i have a lot of problems with this we talked about this in the studio quite a bit my my and i you know i i feel like i've given the game a decently fair shake and it could just be argued that it's not for me right but i don't like things from getting a card in your deck that you may never see or use i don't like what roy mentioned earlier where you you have less time to build up and then the stuff you build up isn't necessarily going to help you in the next level of the dungeon i don't it feels super lucky half the powers i'll never use because they're only good in a duel or if i have time to build up and i feel like every enemy i come across it's like just damage it as much as you possibly can trying to kill in one blow if possible and the nuance of fighting isn't there and that nuance of fighting i feel was better in the two-player one so and that's just a few of the problems i also think it's too difficult i think it's too much to carry around for such a light game i this is i didn't it saying i dislike it's pretty strong but i feel like if i never played it again i wouldn't be upset but i think yeah i can't necessarily disagree with a few of those points tom but at the end of the day i still had a lot of fun with it which is which is what puts me in an interesting place while trying to review it in that i still have a lot of experience i look back i think back and i think oh that was really cool though that time that i pulled off an ultimate at just the right moment and then you know defeated this boss that we weren't sure we were going to defeat because you know the person i was playing with also just pulled off an ultimate before me it has those highs that dice thrown has but it makes this game a little bit more accessible uh having this expansion makes it accessible for some people who can't necessarily play dice thrown head to head because i agree that's the best way to play it but if you have a gaming partner that doesn't like the head-to-head nature of it why not fight a boss which is basically an automated player that's true yeah that's what i was thinking i was thinking the main reason that you would get this game and this is like what i would recommend this for is if you already have dice thrown maybe you play with your buddies head to head but you have someone who doesn't enjoy head-to-head confrontation as much this game is really good for that and also if you just really enjoy dice thrown and you want to get to the table when no one else is around you can play this cooperatively and a lot of the mechanics feel like dice thrown and then you're fighting off against these atomic bosses and things like that that's still a lot of money though and that is the thing that's that's that's a concern of mine it's space money getting it out pulling out all the pieces so my final rating for the game and i struggled over where i'd put this i think a five and i again this is with me giving an 8.5 to the actual game it just doesn't hit it for me uh i played it with my kids i played it with roy i i liked the i liked the idea of the game more than i liked playing it when i played it i felt like i was just you know how the i think it's a really cool mechanism actually for the bad guys you roll dice and it says roll for this combination but i felt that's what i was doing also and that took out the nuance like oh should i do this thing that can build me up for no hit hit the enemy and i know i know someone in the review comments will say well you need to get better at strategy and stuff but i would argue that that's more thought than this game deserves but i am not i am not the majority here i think roy what's your final thoughts in writing um i think i'm gonna give the game a seven but that's also with the caveat on you really need to want this game for solo experience like if you would really enjoy dice throwing already check this out for that um and it allows you to play the game cooperatively you know um i think the game is not it didn't overwhelm me with exploration of dungeon stuff that's what the game like the name of dice thrown adventures makes you think it is definitely not that kind of thing it's mostly just like fight monster after monster after monster you can upgrade your deck and things like that as you go along through the campaign um but you have to be in for that and the price point is pretty heavy but uh seven for me it's it's enjoyable but not something that is super crazy exciting as far as the game goes all right what about you chris i'm also gonna land at a seven with this one with a lot of deliberation because my first few times playing it i probably would have rated it higher but then i i thought about the the fair amount of setup and everything for each session and the amount of shelf space and the price i try not to let price necessarily dictate too much but it's a it's a real consideration for people to say am i going to invest that much in this i think it has a more specific audience than it should so to speak otherwise it could be higher but the fact that i was able to play dice thrown with my five-year-old who wouldn't be able to compete head-to-head with me but we could play against the dungeon or play against a an atama run boss that's a that's a good precious experience for me so overall sticks right at a seven i could recommend it if it sounds good to you after hearing all of our different thoughts mike yeah and and the interesting thing here is i'm going to come in the highest that's not the interesting part i'm coming in at eight the interesting part is that i really don't disagree with really any of the complaints that you're saying i think value is a consideration and i tell you what this game to me would have been rated even higher if they had included two characters within this box and not made it purely a standalone situation to me this game really should have come with two characters in the box self-contained so you could play it as is i don't incompatible with dice throne absolutely there's really to me there's there's no reason why that shouldn't have been there it should not have been completely it should have been a standalone anyway that's my biggest beef but my the the bottom line is i really like dice thrown i prefer it as a regular multiplayer game but i still like if i if i've got somebody that doesn't like head-to-head combat if i'm playing alone i like still having the option to play it so that's where i'm coming in with an eight it's still a lot of fun but it's not perfect it does have flaws and you should be aware of those it's not going to be a game for everybody well there you go folks i hope that you get what you need from that check it out until next time i'm tom vassell i'm chris yee i'm mike delecio and i'm roy cannae have fun rolling five of the same thing [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 30,055

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: BkCOEhfO4uQ

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021